We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead…

The purpose of this study was to investigate sub-lexical segmentation in Spanish-speaking children based on the perception of regular syllables (pseudomorphemes), as well as their association with a visual referent. Both of these skills are the precursors to learning morphology for language acquisition. Twenty-three 12-month-old children…

Bilingualism has been observed to influence cognitive processing across the lifespan but whether bilingual environments have an effect on selective attention and attention strategies in infancy remains an unresolved question. In Study 1, infants exposed to monolingual or bilingual environments participated in an eye-tracking cueing task in which…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

The aim of the present study is to assess the relationship between the young child's attention in a word learning interactive context with the educators in nurseries during shared-book reading and child's subsequent vocabulary growth. The participants in the study were 24 infants from eight nurseries. Each infant was first observed during five…

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a…

We assessed the eye-movements of 4-month-old infants (N = 38) as they visually inspected pairs of images of cats or dogs. In general, infants who had previous experience with pets exhibited more sophisticated inspection than did infants without pet experience, both directing more visual attention to the informative head regions of the animals,…

The development of visual attention is a key component of cognitive functioning in infancy and childhood. By the time children in poverty reach school, deficits in attention are readily apparent; however, when these attention delays manifest is unknown. The current study tested attention longitudinally at 6, 9 and 12?months in infants from…

This study examined the effects of program pacing, defined as the rate of scene and character change per minute, on infants' visual attention to video presentations. Seventy-two infants (twenty-four 6-month-olds, twenty-four 9-month-olds, twenty-four 12-month-olds) were exposed to one of two sets of high- and low-paced commercial infant DVDs. Each…

To examine the ontogeny of emotion-attention interactions, we investigated whether infants exhibit adult-like biases in automatic and voluntary attentional processes towards fearful facial expressions. Heart rate and saccadic eye movements were measured from 7-month-old infants (n = 42) while viewing non-face control stimuli, and neutral, happy,…

A standard operant procedure, Visual Reinforcement Audiometry, was modified to enhance 16 infants' attention to impending auditory signals. The modified technique achieved an average 5.5 dB improvement in threshold over the conventional technique. Correction for adult performance in similar tasks indicated a 3.3 dB attentional effect between…

Studied in three experiments the distribution and malleability of visual attention in 5-month-olds while they inspected large geometric designs. Established that infants who were short-lookers had novelty scores above chance, whereas long-lookers demonstrated chance responding. Illuminating different parts of visual display induced long-lookers to…

Young infants have repeatedly been shown to be slower than older infants to shift fixation from a midline stimulus to a peripheral stimulus. This is generally thought to reflect maturation of the neural substrates that mediate the disengagement of attention, but this developmental difference may also be attributable to young infants' slower…

Examined exogenous orienting among infants between 7 and 21 weeks of age in 2 experiments using display with multiple potential attention targets. Found that as early as 7 weeks of age, sensitivity for a small moving stimulus can be significantly influenced by the simultaneous presence of competing attention targets. Found large increases in…

Observation of eight-month-olds (N=7) during isolated free play session with three toys revealed that significantly more vocalizations were present during transition periods where changes from locus of attention and changes in facial expression occurred. (Author/CB)