Final answer:
During infancy, attention allows infants to focus on novel or significant stimuli, such as human voices and faces, facilitating bonding and social interaction. Habituation helps infants learn to ignore non-threatening, repeated stimuli, conserving energy for more important environmental changes. These processes are key during the sensorimotor stage, which is pivotal for infants' cognitive development.
Step-by-step explanation:
During infancy, attention and habituation are essential processes in learning and development. Habituation allows infants to decrease their response to repeated stimuli that are deemed non-threatening, which is useful for conserving energy and focusing on more relevant environmental changes. For example, infants might initially pay attention to a ticking clock, but after a while, they will habituate and stop responding to this sound. This selective attention is part of normal development and allows infants to ignore stimuli that are not harmful.
In contrast, infants will show increased attention to novel or significant stimuli, such as the sound of a caregiver's voice or the face of their mother. Increased attention to biologically relevant stimuli, like human voices and faces, facilitates bonding and social interaction, which are crucial for survival and development. The sensorimotor stage of development, which lasts from birth until about two years of age, is where much of these developments in attention and habituation occur.
Moreover, infants demonstrate preferences for certain sensory experiences, such as the human face or their mother's voice, indicating that attention is not distributed uniformly across all stimuli, but is influenced by innate preferences that enhance interaction with caregivers and adapt to the environment.