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Impact of Infant Sustained Attention and Parental Supportiveness on Cognition and Communication in a Low-Income Sample

Fri, October 5, 10:45am to 12:15pm, Doubletree Hilton, Room: Redrock

Abstract

Prior research has identified parental supportiveness and the child’s self-regulation and control of attention to be predictors of individual differences in language and cognitive development in infancy and early childhood (Bernier et al., 2010; Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1989). Although child and parental influences may be treated as separable factors, they tend to be correlated due to bi-directional relationships between infant and parental behaviors (Brooks et al., 2018; Yu & Smith, 2016). The current study used archival longitudinal data from the control group of the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (Love et al., 2005) to explore contributions of child and parental factors to early cognitive and communicative development. The children in this dataset (N = 650 at 14m; N = 532 at 24m) came from low-income homes where English was the primary language in use; mother-infant dyads were video-recorded engaging with toys at 14m (3-bag task; Fuligni & Brooks-Gunn, 2013). The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al.,1993) provided estimates of vocabulary comprehension, vocabulary production, and communicative gestures at 14m, and estimates of vocabulary production and sentence complexity at 24m. The Bayley Mental Development Index (Bayley, 1993) provided an assessment of cognitive development at 14m and separate language and visual/spatial factor scores at 24m.

In a series of regression models, we used measures of infant sustained attention and parental supportiveness from the 3-bag task at 14m as predictors of cognitive and communicative development (Tables 1 and 2). Other variables included in the models were child gender, maternal education, and quality of the home environment at 14m (HOME inventory; Caldwell & Bradley, 1984); preliminary analyses indicated that race was not significant and was therefore excluded. Infant sustained attention at 14m predicted all measures of cognitive and communicative development at 14 and 24m. Follow-up analyses indicated that parental supportiveness had an indirect effect on several of the 14m outcomes, mediated by infant sustained attention; parental supportiveness had a direct effect on all 24m outcomes. These results complement other findings (Razza et al., 2010; Yu et al., 2018) suggesting that sustained attention, assessed in the context of joint engagement with caregivers, is a critical determinant of cognitive and communicative development over and above the effect of parenting behavior. As an early manifestation of self-regulation and executive functioning, sustained attention may prove to be a crucial indicator of school readiness and early academic success for children growing up under conditions of economic adversity.

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