Poster #1 - Assessing attention using eye tracking in rural Malawi.

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Researchers have studied infant visual attention and looking behavior for decades. This work has uncovered important behavioral differences that reflect the development of underlying neural structures and that have implications for how infants interact with and learn from the visual world. Other work has identified individual differences in visual information processing and visual memory that are related to factors such as prematurity and that predict later cognitive outcomes. However, with few exceptions, this work has been conducted with convenience samples, often testing infants being raised by middle class parents with at least a high school education, living in technologically advanced societies. Thus, our understanding of the development of infants’ visual attention has relied on WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) samples (Nielsen, 2017), limiting the conclusions we can draw about these findings.

We collected visual attention measures from 157 infants between 5 and 7 .5 months of age living in the Mangochi District, located in Malawi, a Southeastern African country. This population is characterized as low-resource; more than 76% of our sample reported poor living conditions and 43% had limited access to a water source. Additionally, only 45% of the mothers enrolled were literate and 20% of the mothers received no formal education. Thus, these data will allow us to determine if conclusions drawn from WEIRD samples generalize to a very different population. We assessed infants using an adaptation of the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) task developed by Ross-Sheehy and colleagues (Ross-sheehy, Schneegans, & Spencer, 2015). In this task, each trial begins with a central fixation stimulus (a looming smiley face paired with classical music). As infants fixate that stimulus, a 100 ms spatial attention cue (a small black dot) is presented left or right of midline, followed by a target (a realistic photograph of an object, e.g., telephone or apple). Infants received four types of trials: valid cue trials (target appeared in the location of the cue), invalid cue trials (target appeared on the opposite side of the cue), double cue trials (two cues appeared followed by a single target), and no cue baseline trials (no cue before the target appeared).

Spatial attention and orienting speed were assessed using reaction time, or latency to fixate the target. We used a multilevel model (cue condition trials nested within infant) to investigate reaction time to the cue conditions. Our preliminary analyses revealed that the overall pattern of reaction time replicated that observed by Ross-Sheehy et al. (2015). As illustrated in Figure 1, infants showed the fastest reaction time when the cue was valid and the slowest when the cue was invalid, ps <.001. This pattern suggests that the cue was effective at covertly orienting infants’ attention across all conditions. In summary, we verify that basic visual attentional processes are similar in this non-WEIRD sample as has been observed in previous studies. In addition, this work demonstrates that we can feasibly asses these abilities in a rural setting with local experimental testers.

Authors

• Michaela Carol DeBolt, University of California, Davis
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Prado, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

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

• Lisa Oakes, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author