The Effects of Distraction on Cognitive Task Performance During Toddlerhood

We investigated the effects of distraction on attention and task performance during toddlerhood. Thirty toddlers (24‐ to 26‐month‐olds) completed different tasks (2 of each: categorization, problem solving, memory, free play) in one of two conditions: No Distraction or Distraction. The results revealed that the distractor had varying effects on performance scores depending on the task: The problem solving and memory tasks were more susceptible to distraction. In addition, the two conditions showed different patterns of attention over time. Toddlers in the No Distraction condition were more attentive, and their attention remained consistently high across the session. Toddlers in the Distraction condition increased their attention to the task and decreased their attention to the distractor in the second half of the session. This study demonstrates how the presence of distraction influences toddlers’ performance on individual cognitive tasks and contributes to our understanding of distractibility and endogenous attention during toddlerhood. This work also has implications for how environmental noise, such as background television, may influence cognitive development.     

Maternal Attention‐Directing Strategies and Infant Focused Attention During Problem Solving

Forty‐nine mother‐infant dyads participated in the study. Mothers were observed during free play with their infants to assess their attention‐directing strategies. Infants were observed during the Bayley to assess their focused attention abilities. Assessments were made when infants were 10 and 18 months. Whereas consistently high levels of maintaining over time were modestly associated with better infant focused attention at 18 months, consistently high levels of redirecting were moderately associated with poorer infant focused attention at 18 months. Additionally, more focused attention was associated with higher Bayley scores at both ages. Although the direction of effects could not be determined, the findings suggest links between maternal attention‐directing strategies (maintaining and redirecting) during play and infant attentional abilities during problem solving.     

Gaze Behaviors of Preterm and Full‐Term Infants in Nonsocial and Social Contexts of Increasing Dynamics: Visual Recognition,Attention Regulation,and Gaze Synchrony

Although research has demonstrated poor visual skills in premature infants, few studies assessed infants’ gaze behaviors across several domains of functioning in a single study. Thirty premature and 30 full‐term 3‐month‐old infants were tested in three social and nonsocial tasks of increasing complexity and their gaze behavior was micro‐coded. In a one‐trial version of the visual recognition paradigm, where novel stimuli were paired with familiar stimuli, preterm infants showed longer first looks to novel stimuli. In the behavior response paradigm, which presented infants with 17 stimuli of increasing complexity in a predetermined “on‐off” sequence, premature infants tended to look away from toys more during presentation. Finally, during mother–infant face‐to‐face interaction, the most dynamic interpersonal context, preterm infants and their mothers displayed short, frequent episodes of gaze synchrony, and lag‐sequential analysis indicated that both mother and infant broke moments of mutual gaze within 2 sec of its initiation. The propotion of look away during the behavior response paradigm was related to lower gaze synchrony and more gaze breaks during mother–infant interactions. Results are discussed in terms of the unique and adaptive gaze patterns typical of low‐risk premature infants.     

The Development of Affect Specificity in Infants' Use of Emotion Cues

This study examined the emergence of affect specificity in infancy. In this study, infants received verbal and facial signals of 2 different, negatively valenced emotions (fear and sadness) as well as neutral affect via a television monitor to determine if they could make qualitative distinctions among emotions of the same valence. Twenty 12‐ to 14‐month‐olds and 20 16‐ to 18‐month‐olds were examined. Results suggested that younger infants showed no evidence of referential specificity, as they responded similarly to both the target and distracter toys, and showed no evidence of affect specificity, showing no difference in play between affect conditions. Older infants, in contrast, showed evidence both of referential and affect specificity. With respect to affect specificity, 16‐ to 18‐month‐olds touched the target toy less in the fear condition than in the sad condition and showed a larger proportion of negative facial expressions in the sad condition versus the fear condition. These findings suggest a developmental emergence after 15 months of age for affect specificity in relating emotional messages to objects.     

Infants’ Use of Force to Defend Toys: The Origins of Instrumental Aggression

The two aims of the study were (a) to determine when infants begin to use force intentionally to defend objects to which they might have a claim and (b) to examine the relationship between toddlers’ instrumental use of force and their tendencies to make possession claims. Infants’ and toddlers’ reactions to peers’ attempts to take their toys were assessed in three independent data sets in which the same observational coding system had been used (N = 200). To ensure that infants’ use of force was goal‐directed and not a simple physical reaction, we recorded infants’ reactions when peers picked up toys that the focal infants had just put down, or were nearby or in the focal infants’ mothers’ laps. The use of force in response to peers’ taking over toys was evident before the first birthday, but more common thereafter, although only a minority of children in each sample used force. Analysis of a combined data set revealed that force was deployed more often by 2‐year‐olds than younger infants, and was significantly associated with verbal references to people’s possession of objects. These observations show that toddlers do deploy force intentionally to defend their possessions.     

The emergence of object‐based visual attention in infancy: A role for family socioeconomic status and competing visual features

The development of spatial visual attention has been extensively studied in infants, but far less is known about the emergence of object‐based visual attention. We tested 3–5‐ and 9–12‐month‐old infants on a task that allowed us to measure infants’ attention orienting bias toward whole objects when they competed with color, motion, and orientation feature information. Infants’ attention orienting to whole objects was affected by the dimension of the competing visual feature. Whether attention was biased toward the whole object or its salient competing feature (e.g., “ball” or “red”) changed with age for the color feature, with infants biased toward whole objects with age. Moreover, family socioeconomic status predicted feature‐based attention in the youngest infants and object‐based attention in the older infants when color feature information competed with whole‐object information.     

The Role of Dyadic Coordination in Organizing Visual Attention in 5‐Month‐Old Infants

In human infants, the ability to share attention with others is facilitated by increases in attentional selectivity and focus. Differences in early attention have been associated with socio‐cognitive outcomes including language, yet the social mechanisms of attention organization in early infancy have only recently been considered. Here, we examined how social coordination between 5‐month‐old infants and caregivers relate to differences in infant attention, including looking preferences, span, and reactivity to caregivers’ social cues. Using a naturalistic play paradigm, we found that 5‐month‐olds who received a high ratio of sensitive (jointly focused) contingent responses showed strong preferences for objects with which their caregivers were manually engaged. In contrast, infants whose caregivers exhibited high ratios of redirection (attempts to shift focus) showed no preferences for caregivers’ held objects. Such differences have implications for recent models of cognitive development, which rely on early looking preferences for adults’ manually engaged objects as a pathway toward joint attention and word learning. Further, sensitivity and redirectiveness predicted infant attention even in reaction to caregiver responses that were non‐referential (neither sensitive nor redirective). In response to non‐referentials, infants of highly sensitive caregivers oriented less frequently than infants of highly redirective caregivers, who showed increased distractibility. Our results suggest that specific dyadic exchanges predict infant attention differences toward broader social cues, which may have consequences for social‐cognitive outcomes.     

Age‐Specific Preferences for Infant‐Directed Affective Intent

This study examined the developmental course of infants' attentional preferences for 3 types of infant‐directed affective intent, which have been shown to be commonly used at particular ages in the first year of life. Specifically, Kitamura and Burnham (2003) found mothers' tone of voice in infant‐directed speech is most comforting between birth and 3 months, most approving at 6 months, and most directive at 9 months. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess whether there is a relation between the type of affective intent used by mothers at each age point, and infants' affective intent preferences. Each infant group, 3‐, 6‐, and 9‐month‐olds, was played the 3 types of affective intent alternating across a single test session. When analyzed across age, the interactions revealed the predicted developmental trajectory; that is, infant preferences transformed between 3 and 6 months from comforting to approving, and between 6 and 9 months, from approving to directive. However, when analyzed separately by age, it was shown that 3‐month‐olds preferred comforting to other types; 6‐month‐olds preferred approving to directive, but listened equally to approving and comforting; and 9‐month‐olds showed no preference for any type of affective intent. Because it was possible that 9‐month‐olds were more focused on phonetic and phonotactic information, a new group of 9‐month‐olds was tested with intonation‐only versions of the 3 affective intent types. Under these conditions, they were found to prefer directive to comforting, but not directive to approving types. The results of this study have implications for what infants pay attention to in their social and linguistic environment over the course of the first year.     

Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Distracters on Immediate and Long‐Term Recall in Toddlers

We explored the role that exogenous and endogenous competitors for attention play in infants’ abilities to encode and retain information over a 6‐month period. Sixty‐six children visited the laboratory at 15 months, and 32 returned for a second visit at 21 months. Children observed models of conventional‐ relation and enabling‐relation action sequences. Half the children were distracted by a “Mister Monkey” mechanical toy during the conventional‐relation sequence, while the other half was distracted during the enabling‐relation sequence. The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire indexed endogenous factors at both ages. Immediate postmodel production of target actions indexed encoding efficiency, and 6‐month production of target actions indexed long‐term recall. The exogenous distracter impacted encoding efficiency (i.e., immediate recall), but not long‐term recall. Endogenous factors (i.e., temperament) were primarily associated with long‐term recall. Of special interest was our finding that endogenous factors, especially surgency, moderated the effect of the exogenous distracter. It appears that when learning conventional‐relation sequences in the presence of exogenous distracters, surgency mobilizes attentional resources toward the learning objective; however, when learning enabling‐relation sequences under the same conditions, surgency either boosts the saliency of the distracters or boosts children’s susceptibility to them.     

Play in Mexican‐American mothers and toddlers is frequent,multimodal, and rich in symbolic content

Play offers rich opportunities for toddlers to develop motor, social, cognitive, and language skills, particularly during interactions with adult caregivers who may scaffold toddlers to higher levels of play than toddlers achieve on their own. However, research on play has narrowly focused on children from White, middle‐income backgrounds, leaving a dearth of knowledge about dyadic play in diverse cultural communities. We videorecorded 222 Mexican‐American mothers playing with their 2‐year‐old toddlers with a standard set of toys. Play behaviors were coded as nonsymbolic or symbolic (play type) and as expressed through manual, verbal, or multiple channels (play modality). Play between toddlers and mothers was frequent, high in symbolic content, and toddler play closely corresponded with mother play in type and modality: Toddlers’ nonsymbolic play related to mothers’ nonsymbolic play; toddlers’ symbolic play related to mothers’ symbolic play; toddlers’ manual play related to mothers’ manual play; and toddlers’ multimodal play related to mothers’ multimodal play. Play in Mexican‐American mothers and toddlers is frequent, multimodal, and symbolically rich, offering new directions for future research and practice.     

The Trajectory of Concurrent Motor and Vocal Behaviors Over the Transition to Crawling in Infancy

To document the trajectory of motor and vocal behaviors in real and developmental time, we observed infants at each of four biweekly naturalistic play sessions over the transition to crawling. An exhaustive and mutually exclusive coding scheme documented all vocalizations and postures. Odds ratios of the likelihood of a given posture‐vocalization dyad revealed that vocalization and crawling were significantly unlikely to co‐occur at the session marking the onset of crawling. We speculate that infants’ allocation of attention over the transition to crawling prompted behavioral trade‐offs. During mastery of a novel skill, infants may have had difficulty allocating attention to multiple tasks, but with experience, a decrease in attentional load for the new skill allowed performance of simultaneous behaviors in other domains to occur.     

The Effect of Maternal Mirroring Behavior on Infants’ Early Social Bidding During the Still‐Face Task

Maternal mirroring behavior, which is a particularly salient form of maternal responsiveness, was investigated as a predictor of infants’ social bids in the Still‐Face Task. Mother–infant dyads engaged in the Still‐Face Task when infants were 5 months, on the cusp of the active emergence of social bidding during the still‐face phase of the task. Maternal mirroring of infants’ behavior during the interactive phases of the task was a primary predictor of infants’ social bids in the still‐face phase. When infants were divided into those who experienced higher maternal mirroring (maternal mirroring above the mean of the sample) and infants who experienced lower maternal mirroring (maternal mirroring at or below the mean), infants with higher maternal mirroring showed increases in nondistress vocalizations during the still‐face phase, indicative of social bidding, whereas the infants with lower maternal mirroring showed little change in nondistress vocalizations across the phases. Maternal mirroring allows infants to readily notice the relation between their own behaviors and those of their mothers, which may enhance infants’ early understanding that they can be active agents in instigating social interactions, as demonstrated by social bidding.     

Measuring the Development of Social Attention Using Free‐Viewing

How do young children direct their attention to other people in the natural world? Although many studies have examined the perception of faces and of goal‐directed actions, relatively little work has focused on what children will look at in complex and unconstrained viewing environments. To address this question, we showed videos of objects, faces, children playing with toys, and complex social scenes to a large sample of infants and toddlers between 3 and 30 months old. We found systematic developmental changes in what children looked at. When viewing faces alone, younger children looked more at eyes and older children more at mouths, especially when the faces were making expressions or talking. In the more complex videos, older children looked more at hands than younger children, especially when the hands were performing actions. Our results suggest that as children develop they become better able to direct their attention to the parts of complex scenes that are most interesting socially.     

What Habituates in Infant Visual Habituation? A Psychophysiological Analysis

Despite the use of visual habituation over the past half century, relatively little is known about its underlying processes. We analyzed heart rate (HR) taken simultaneous with looking during infant‐controlled habituation sessions collected longitudinally at 4, 6, and 8 months of age with the goal of examining how HR and HR‐defined phases of attention change across habituation. There were four major findings. First, the depth and topography of decelerations and proportion of sustained attention (SA) did not vary across habituation at any age, which suggested (in contrast to the tenets of comparator theory) the persistence of substantial cognitive activity at the end of visual habituation. Second, attention termination (AT) robustly declined across trials, suggesting that, contrary to prior thinking, AT might be a sensitive indicant of visual learning. Third, infants at all ages showed an HR increase (startle) to stimulus onset on the first trial, the magnitude of which was associated with subsequent delayed HR deceleration and less SA; thus, stimulus events affect processing during trials. Finally, mean overall HR reliably increased across trials for all ages. This last finding implies the need to distinguish between “phasic” HR changes (e.g., decelerations during looks) and longer term “tonic” HR changes (mean increases across trials) during habituation, and raises the question of what processes the tonic increases might reflect within the habituation paradigm.     

The Development of Selective Attention Orienting is an Agent of Change in Learning and Memory Efficacy

This study examined whether the developmental transition from facilitation‐based orienting mechanisms available very early in life to selective attention orienting (e.g., inhibition of return, IOR) promotes better learning and memory in infancy. We tested a single age group (4‐month‐olds) undergoing rapid development of attention orienting mechanisms. Infants completed a spatial cueing task designed to elicit IOR, in which cat or dog category exemplars consistently appeared in either the cued or noncued locations. Infants were subsequently tested on a visual paired comparison of exemplars from these cued and noncued animal categories. As expected, infants showed either facilitation‐based orienting or the more mature IOR‐based orienting during spatial cueing/encoding. Infants who demonstrated IOR‐based orienting showed memory for both specific exemplars and broader category learning, whereas those who showed facilitation‐based orienting showed weaker evidence of learning. Attention orienting also interacted with previous pet experience, such that the number of pets at home influenced learning only when infants engaged facilitation‐based orienting during encoding. Learning in the context of IOR‐based orienting was stable regardless of pet experience, suggesting that selective attention serves as an online learning mechanism during visual exploration that is less sensitive to prior experience.     

Infant locomotion shapes proximity to adults during everyday play in the U.S.

Learning to walk expands infants’ access to the physical environment and prompts changes in their communicative behaviors. However, little is known about whether walking also shapes infants’ proximity to their adult social partners during everyday activities at home. Here we followed 89 infants (42 boys, 47 girls; 92% White, not Hispanic or Latino) longitudinally and documented connections between infant locomotion and infant-adult proximity on two timescales: (1) across developmental time, by comparing data from a session when infants could only crawl to a later session when they could walk (M walk onset = 12.15 months, range = 8-15); and (2) in real time, by testing whether the amount of time that infants spent in motion (regardless of their locomotor status) related to their interpersonal distance to adults. The developmental transition to walking corresponded to a significant, but modest, decrease in infant-adult proximity. Infants’ moment-to-moment locomotion, however, was strongly related to patterns of interpersonal distance: infants who spent more time in motion spent less time near adults and instigated more proximity transitions, resulting in shorter and more dispersed bouts of proximity throughout sessions. Findings shed new light on how infants’ motor achievements can reverberate across other domains of development, and how changes in infant development that researchers often observe over months arise from infants’ moment-to-moment experiences.     

Anger and Approach Motivation in Infancy: Relations to Early Childhood Inhibitory Control and Behavior Problems

The relations among infant anger reactivity, approach behavior, and frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry, and their relations to inhibitory control and behavior problems in early childhood were examined within the context of a longitudinal study of temperament. Two hundred nine infants’ anger expressions to arm restraint were observed at 4 months of age. Infants’ approach behaviors during play with an unpredictable toy and baseline frontal EEG asymmetry were assessed at 9 months of age. Inhibitory control during a Go/No‐Go task and parent report of behavior problems were evaluated at 4 years of age. High anger‐prone infants with left, but not right, frontal EEG asymmetry showed significantly more approach behaviors and less inhibitory control relative to less anger‐prone infants. Although a link between anger proneness in infancy and behavior problems in early childhood was not found, a combination of low approach behaviors and poor inhibitory control was predictive of internalizing behaviors.     

Toddlers' Empathy‐Related Responding to Distress: Predictions From Negative Emotionality and Maternal Behavior in Infancy

This study focused on the predictive contributions of infants' temperamental negative emotionality (proneness to fear, anger), sex, maternal responsivity, and their interaction on toddlers' empathy‐related responding to distress in 3 contexts. Ninety‐eight infants and their mothers participated in a longitudinal study. When the infants were 10 months of age, mothers completed assessments of infant temperamental anger and fear, and maternal behaviors were observed in a free‐play setting. At 18 months of age, toddlers' empathy‐related responding to the distress of a stranger, a crying baby doll, and the mother was assessed. A series of hierarchical and logistic regressions were performed, and results indicated that infant fear predicted higher concerned awareness toward adults and higher personal distress reactions toward the mother. In addition, maternal responsivity predicted higher concerned attention and lower personal distress reactions toward the baby doll and mother. Findings also revealed several interaction effects to predict toddlers' empathy‐related responding to distress.