Executive attention and self-regulation in infancy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2008.02.001Get rights and content

Abstract

This study investigates early executive attention in infancy by studying the relations between infant sequential looking and other behaviors predictive of later self-regulation. One early marker of executive attention development is anticipatory looking, the act of looking to the location of a target prior to its appearance in that location, a process that involves endogenous control of visual orienting. Previous studies have shown that anticipatory looking is positively related to executive attention as assessed by the ability to resolve spatial conflict in 3–4-year-old children. In the current study, anticipatory looking was positively related to cautious behavioral approach in response to non-threatening novel objects in 6- and 7-month-old infants. This finding and previous findings showing the presence of error detection in infancy are consistent with the hypothesis that there is some degree of executive attention in the first year of life. Anticipatory looking was also related to the frequency of distress, to looking away from disturbing stimuli, and to some self-regulatory behaviors. These results may indicate either early attentional regulation of emotion or close relations between early developing fear and later self-regulation. Overall, the results suggest the presence of rudimentary systems of executive attention in infants and support further studies using anticipatory looking as a measure of individual differences in attention in infancy.

Section snippets

Participants

Fifty infants (20 females) were recruited through birth announcements or fliers distributed to day care centers and parenting programs in Eugene, Oregon and surrounding communities. Participants were predominantly white and non-Hispanic. They were recruited for a longitudinal study examining temperament and attention development in infancy and early childhood. The findings presented here come from the initial data collection with this sample.

The majority of infants were either 6 months (N = 21)

Results

Preliminary analyses examined effects of infant gender on behavior in the visual sequence task, toy, and mask presentations. There was no evidence of significant gender differences in behavior, so gender was not included in the analyses reported below. The means and standard deviations for all major outcome variables are presented in Table 1.

Discussion

The visual sequence task we used differed from previous studies (Rothbart et al., 2003) by introducing a central loom before each sequence. This addition and the use of both ambiguous and unambiguous events in the same sequence probably led to fewer anticipations than have been obtained previously (Clohessy et al., 2001). Despite this difficulty, our findings are generally consistent with the idea that rudimentary forms of executive attention may be observable in infancy.

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by NIH grant HD38051.

References (26)

  • A.B. Clohessy et al.

    Development of the functional visual field

    Acta Psychologica

    (2001)
  • J. Fan et al.

    The activation of attentional networks

    Neuroimage

    (2005)
  • M.R. Rueda et al.

    Development of attentional networks in childhood

    Neuropsychologia

    (2004)
  • N. Aksan et al.

    Links between systems of inhibition from infancy to preschool years

    Child Development

    (2004)
  • J.G. Auerbach et al.

    The association of the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) and the serotonin transporter promotor gene (5 HTTL-PR) with temperament in 12-month-old infants

    Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

    (2001)
  • A. Berger et al.

    Infant brains detect arithmetic error

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America

    (2006)
  • M.M. Botvinick et al.

    Conflict monitoring and cognitive control

    Psychological Review

    (2001)
  • S.D. Calkins et al.

    Caregiver influences on emerging emotion regulation: Biological and environmental transactions in early development

  • R.L. Canfield et al.

    Infant information processing through the first year of life: A longitudinal study using the visual expectation paradigm

    Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development

    (1997)
  • T. Curran et al.

    Attentional and non-attentional forms of sequence learning

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

    (1993)
  • S. Dehaene et al.

    Localization of a neural system for error detection and compensation

    Psychological Science

    (1994)
  • J.L. Fleiss

    Statistical methods for rates and proportions

    (1981)
  • W.J. Gehring et al.

    A neural system for error detection and compensation

    Psychological Science

    (1993)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text