Impairments in joint attention are considered core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and are crucial for early assessment and intervention. However, existing information about visual attention during joint attention and its relation to developmental functioning is limited. The current study investigated the visual attention differences…

We introduce a novel method to test a classic idea in developmental science that children's attention to a stimulus is driven by how much they can learn from it. Preschoolers (4-6 years, M=4.6) watched a video where a distracting animation accompanied static, page-by-page illustrations of a storybook. The audio narration for each storybook page…

Habituation and dishabituation are the most prevalent measures of infant cognitive functioning, and they have reliably been shown to predict later cognitive outcomes. Yet, the exact mechanisms underlying infant habituation and dishabituation are still unclear. To investigate them, we tested 106 8-month-old infants on a classic habituation task and…

Caregiver executive functions (EFs) play an integral role in shaping cognitive development. Here, we investigated how caregiver EF abilities (86 caregivers; "mean age" = 33.4 years, SD = 4.5) was associated with visual working memory (VWM) in infants (86 infants females; mean age = 250.6 days, SD = 35.8). The BRIEF-A was used to assess…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of cognitive training (CT) using mobile applications on attentional control and impulsivity among pre-service teachers. Pre-service teachers were divided into two groups: experimental (n=25) and control (n=14) groups, they were selected from a large sample (n=718). Over 28 sessions, the…

Although looking-time methods have long been used to measure infant attention and investigate aspects of cognitive development, steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) measures may be more sensitive or practical in some contexts. Here, we demonstrate habituation of infants' SSVEP amplitudes to a flickering checkerboard stimulus, and…

The literature on human and animal learning suggests that individuals attend to and act on cues differently based on the order in which they were learned. Recent studies have proposed that one specific type of learning outcome, the highlighting effect, can serve as a framework for understanding a number of early cognitive milestones. However,…

The present study examined the hypothesis that inhibitory visual selection mechanisms play a vital role in memory by limiting distractor interference during item encoding. In Experiment 1a we used a modified spatial cueing task in which 9-month-old infants encoded multiple category exemplars in the contexts of an attention orienting mechanism…

Prosaccade and antisaccade errors in the context of social and nonsocial stimuli were investigated in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 19) a matched control sample (n = 19), and a small sample of youth with obsessive compulsive disorder (n = 9). Groups did not differ in error rates in the prosaccade condition for any stimulus…

A number of authors have suggested that attention control may be a suitable target for cognitive training in children with autism spectrum disorder. This study provided the first evidence of the feasibility of such training using a battery of tasks intended to target visual attentional control in children with autism spectrum disorder within…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

Students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are being included more frequently in the general educational setting, and are therefore increasingly expected to access and master core curricular content, including mathematics. However, mathematics often presents challenges to students with ASD. Interventions to improve the mathematics skills of…

Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processing of adults from Eastern and Western cultures. Cognition in Eastern adults is often more relational and in Western adults is more object focused. Three experiments examined whether these differences characterize the cognition of preschool…

Despite the fact that hemispheric asymmetry of attention has been widely studied, a clear picture of this complex phenomenon is still lacking. The aim of the present study was to provide an efficient and reliable measurement of potential hemispheric asymmetries of three attentional networks, i.e. alerting, orienting and executive attention.…

Two experiments tested a hypothesis that reducing demands on executive control in a Dimensional Change Card Sort task will lead to improved performance in 3-year-olds. In Experiment 1, the shape dimension was represented by two dissimilar values ("stars" and "flowers"), and the color dimension was represented by two similar values ("red" and…