Cross cultural analysis of infant visual selective attention development

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

Visual attention is an important means for infants to learn about their environment. Until recently, virtually all of the studies examining infants’ visual attention were conducted with samples from Western, high-resource countries. This sampling bias is problematic, mainly because it limits the generalizability of the evidence and our understanding of core mechanisms underlying infant development (Nielson et al. 2017). One recent effort to extend research to understudied populations revealed qualitatively similar overall performance on several visual attention tasks between Finnish and Malawian infants, although the Malawian infants showed slower reaction times (Forssman et al., 2015, 2017). Thus, there appear to be similarities and differences in attentional processes between diverse samples.
We compared visual attention in two samples of infants; 257 infants between 6 and 9 months of age living in the Mangochi District of Malawi, and 50 6- to 9-month-old infants living in Northern California, USA. The Malawian sample is characterized as low-resource, with a high percentage (77%) reporting moderate to severe food insecurity, whereas the US sample is high-resource. The samples also differed in parental education, with the mothers in Malawi having lower levels of education (21% completed primary school) than the mothers in the US (77% completed bachelor’s degree or higher).
All infants were tested using an adaptation of the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) task (Ross-Sheehy et al., 2015) with a Tobii Pro X2-60 eye tracker. In this task, each trial begins with a central fixation stimulus (see Figure 1). As infants fixate that stimulus, a 100 ms spatial cue is presented left or right of midline, followed by a target (a photograph of an object). 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 target), and no cue baseline trials (no cue before the target appeared).
As was observed by Forssman et al. (2015, 2017), the two groups showed similar overall patterns of reaction time, and reaction time by trial type replicated that observed by Ross- Sheehy et al. (2015). Infants were fastest to orient to validly-cued targets and the slowest to orient to invalidly-cued targets, ps <.001 (see Figure 2). Thus, the cue effectively orientated both groups of infants’ attention. However, in all four cue conditions, the Malawian infants’ reaction times were slower than the US infants (𝛽!" = -135.96, p <.001), also similar to findings reported by Forssman et al. (2015, 2017). This work verifies that basic visual attentional processes are qualitatively similar between infants in high- and low-resource settings; although, we observed quantitative differences in processing speed between the Malawian and US infants. This work expands our understanding of infant attention development outside of Western cultural contexts.

Authors

• Michaela DeBolt, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Zhijun Chen, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine Cox, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Bess L Caswell, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mathews George
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kenneth Maleta, College of Medicine, University of Malawi
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christine P Stewart, Institute for Global Nutrition, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

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

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

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