Executive attention and self-regulation 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.
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