3-153 - Sustained Attention in Early Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Sustained Attention (SA) is a type of endogenous attention that supports visual learning and predicts future outcomes in language, school achievement and self-regulation. This interdisciplinary and international symposium integrates multiple approaches (behavioral, physiological, neural, and computational) to studying SA across contexts (Solo: just the infant, Joint: both infant and parent). All four papers examine infant attention to document the infant-related and social factors that support SA in-the-moment and over developmental time.
Papers 1 and 2 examine the brain mechanisms that support Solo SA in-the-moment. Together they show that Solo SA is characterized by distinct patterns of infant’s functional brain connectivity (Paper 1) and infant’s greater control of the focus of their attention (Paper 2).
Papers 2 and 3 use neural and behavioral measures to examine Joint SA and suggest that increased parental engagement – shown by parents’ greater neural responsivity and more simultaneous multimodal behavior with the infant-attended object – supports more SA in-the-moment (Paper 2) and nine months later (Paper 3), highlighting the role that social partners play for infant SA at different timescales.
Paper 4 focuses on the infant mechanisms that drive the development of Solo top-down attention using a recurrent neural network to model infant visual attention. This paper complements Papers 1-3 as it proposes a mechanism that drives the development of SA and depends solely on the infant’s system.
Together these four papers show that infant attention develops from the interaction of infant- and social-factors acting not only in-the-moment but over developmental time.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Catalina Suarez-Rivera, Indiana University

Individual Presentations

• Infant Sustained Attention and Brain Functional Connectivity - Presenting Author: Wanze Xie, Harvard Medical School; Boston Children's Hospital; Non-Presenting Author: Brittany M. Mallin, Ultrasound Leadership Academy; Non-Presenting Author: John Richards, University of South Carolina

• Parental Neural Responsivity to Infants’ Attention: How Mature Brains Support Immature Brains During Social Interaction - Presenting Author: Sam Wass, University of Cambridge; Non-Presenting Author: Valdas Noreika, Cambridge University; Non-Presenting Author: Stanimira Georgieva, Cambridge University; Non-Presenting Author: Kaili Clackson, Cambridge University; Non-Presenting Author: Victoria Leong, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Cambridge University, UK

• Long Term Consequences of Joint Parent-Infant Play: Social Partners Train Infant’s Regulation of Sustained Attention - Presenting Author: Catalina Suarez-Rivera, Indiana University; Non-Presenting Author: Linda B Smith, Indiana University; Non-Presenting Author: Chen Yu, Indiana University

• Computational Account for the Development of Top-Down Visual Attention - Presenting Author: Yukie Nagai, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology