Human neonatal cardiac responses to sound: a power function

Abstract

Human newborns were each presented with four intensities of a 1 kHz tone in 5 complete cycles of ascending and descending series. An approx. linear relation was observed between cardiac responses plotted on a log scale and stimulus intensity in dB. This is consistent with the power law relation between stimulus and response shown by Stevens (1961) to hold for a large # of sensory systems.