The Discrepancy Hypothesis of Attention and Affect in Infants

Abstract

In its most general form, the discrepancy hypothesis states that an organism attends and affectively responds to new stimuli as an inverted-U function of the stimuli's physical or conceptual discrepancy (i.e., dissimilarity) from a well-familiarized standard stimulus. That is, moderate discrepancies from highly familiar stimuli receive both the highest degree of attention and positive affect, whereas stimuli that are quite familiar or extremely different from what the organism knows well receive relatively less attention and less positive—perhaps even negative—affective responses and evaluations. The hypothesis is presented graphically in Figure 1.