Poster #13 - Using visual orienting behaviors to classify patterns of attentional proficiency at 5-, 8- and 11-months

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Infants eye movements or saccades change rapidly over the first few months of life, and these changes may help shed light on underlying changes in the brain. Though at birth saccades are slow and hypometric, they change rapidly over the first months, becoming faster, more accurate, and more attentionally driven. By systematically examining orienting behavior over the first several months of life, it may be possible to characterize both typical and atypical patterns of development early in infancy when interventions are most successful. To that end, we employed the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA; Ross-Sheehy et al., 2015) task to assess visual orienting behavior. The IOWA task consists of a series of cued attention trials, that vary in their degree of cue/target competition. Results from the IOWA task can be used to produces multiple attention and orienting scores, including saccade speed, accuracy, and spatial attention. These scores can be combined to create nuanced individual difference scores that characterize infants into unique attentional patterns, or phenotypes.

Infants were tested longitudinally in the IOWA task at 5-, 8- and 11-months. All IOWA task trials began with a central fixation stimulus. Once fixated, the infants were presented with a rapid series of events: A 100ms attention cue (small black dot + tone, presented left or right of center), followed by a 100ms delay, and finally the presentation of a colorful target. Sometimes the cue and target were presented in the same spatial location (valid) sometimes they were opposite each other (invalid). Sometimes there were two cues (double) and sometimes there was either no spatial cue (tone) or neither spatial nor tone (no cue). Each of these conditions assessed a different aspect of attentional proficiency, from lower-level reflexive orienting, to higher-level saccade inhibition. Reaction time (RT) and orienting accuracy to the target were assessed using eye tracking, and six key attention scores were created (see Ross-Sheehy, et al., 2015; Table1).

To determine if these attention scores produced unique patterns of responding (attentional phenotypes), a latent cluster analysis was conducted using the 11-month-old data. Results of this analysis revealed three distinct clusters: “High reactive” infants (4%) are characterized by strong spatial attention and fast reaction times accompanied by high error rates. This pattern suggests fast processing speed with little to no inhibitory control of eye movements. “Low reactive” infants (41%) have weak spatial attention, slow reaction times, and low error rates, suggesting relatively slow processing speed. Finally, “High flexible” infants (55%) have strong spatial attention, fast reaction times, and moderate to low error rates, suggesting both fast processing speed, and strong inhibitory control of eye movements (Table1).

To assess the stability of these attentional phenotypes, we fit growth trajectory models to each cluster across all three ages. Results reveal clear and significant differences in growth trajectory as a function of attentional phenotype and identify with surprising specificity mechanisms of emerging individual differences (Fig1). Taken together, these results reveal clear patterns of attention that influence behavior early in life. Continuing analyses examine the relation of these attentional phenotypes to concurrent performance on unrelated cognitive tasks.

Authors

• Esther Reynolds, University of Tennessee
  Presenting Author

• Bret Eschman, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amanda Rosales, University of Tennessee
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shannon Ross-Sheehy, University of Tennesee, Knoxville
  Non-Presenting Author