Poster #2 - Attentional Orienting in Infancy is Associated with Temperament and Cognitive Development

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Infants grow up in complex and stimulating environments where their attentional skills guide learning and exploration. Attentional orienting in infancy, namely, shifting the focus of attention from one entity to another, is a basic attentional skill (Posner & Petersen, 1990), that is thought to be related to both infants’ temperament and information processing ability. Infants high in temperamental negative affectivity show higher latencies to orient to an entity outside of the current attentional focus (Conejero & Rueda, 2018; Nakagawa & Sukigara, 2012). On the other hand, a high rate of attention shifting between presented stimuli has been interpreted as a measure of higher-order information processing (Colombo et al., 1989) and executive processes (Brown & DeLoache, 1978). In this longitudinal study, we further ask whether shift rate reflects temperamental characteristics, and whether latency and shift rate predict cognitive and communicative development.
At 8 and 18 months, seventeen Turkish-learning infants (9 girls) completed an attentional orienting task where their eye gaze was sampled at 60 Hz by the Tobii-T120 eye tracker. In each of the ten trials, a central stimulus (3.0°x4.4°) appeared accompanied by a sound. After 2000 ms, a peripheral stimulus appeared either on the left or on the right side with a 9.6° distance from the central stimulus. Both stimuli remained on the screen for 5000 ms followed by the inter-trial interval (1250 ms). Stimuli consisted of colored drawings of animals. Two measures taken from this task were (a) the latency to fixate the peripheral stimulus after its onset and (b) the shift rate between the central and peripheral stimuli calculated as the ratio of the number of shifts divided by the total looking time to the stimuli when both were on the screen.
At 10 months, as a temperament measure, mothers completed the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised (Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003). Mothers reported on their infants’ receptive language at 14 months and on their productive language at 18 months via the Turkish version (Aksu-Koç et al., 2009) of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007). Finally, at 18 months, infants were administered the Bayley-III Cognitive Scale (Bayley, 2006) to assess their cognitive development.
Mixed-effects analyses showed a decrease in shift rate from 8 months (M(SD)=1.04(0.35)) to 18 months (M(SD)=0.95(0.29)), (Estimate=-0.15, SE=0.07, p=.05) where the latency did not change significantly across the ages. Shift rate at 8 months was negatively correlated with the temperamental factor negative affectivity, r=-.68, p=.008, and positively correlated with Bayley scores, r=.58, p=.048 (see Figures 1 & 2). Neither latency nor shift rate predicted language outcomes.
In sum, the results showed that (1) shift rate decreases with age possibly indicating an increase in sustained attention, (2) complementing previous findings about latency, infants with more negative affectivity had lower shift rates, and (3) higher shift rates in early infancy may indicate shorter looking durations that are usually associated with better cognitive outcomes (e.g., Bronson, 1991). Overall, early attentional orienting skills seem to be related to both infants’ temperament and cognitive development.

Authors

• Berna Uzundag, Koç University
  Presenting Author

• Sumeyye Koskulu, Koc University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Aylin Küntay, Koc University
  Non-Presenting Author