V. CORTISOL RESPONSE PATTERNS AND DETECTION OF CHANGE IN AUDITORY AND VISUAL STIMULI

In this section, we present the predictions, methods, and results of the experiments that investigated associations between cortisol response and infant cognition at each phase, separately, followed by a brief summary and discussion of the results from all of the phases. Phase 2 used a habituation/dishabituation paradigm in which infants viewed a looping audiovisual stimulus comprised of a cartoon and a phrase spoken by their own mothers. At test, infants were presented with novel stimulus combinations, which included a new cartoon, a new phrase spoken by their mother, or both. We predicted that cortisol reactivity would affect infants' performance; namely, infants with decreasing cortisol reactivity patterns would discriminate more changes in the audiovisual test stimuli than infants whose cortisol increased.