Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 264

Attention refers to our ability to direct our awareness. The ability to focus and switch attention is critical for selecting information to process it in working memory and is influenced by neurological development, including advances in myelination (Qiu, Mori, & Miller, 2015). Important developments in attention occur over the course of infancy and continue throughout childhood.

Infant attention is often studied using the same methods used to learn about their visual perception. Preferential-looking procedures (measuring and comparing the length of time infants look at two stimuli) and habituation procedures (measuring the length of time it takes infants to show a reduction in how long they look at a nonchanging stimulus) are used to study infants’ attention to visual stimuli, such as geometric patterns (Ristic & Enns, 2015). Infants show more attentiveness to dynamic stimuli—stimuli that change over tim—than to static, unchanging stimuli (Reynolds, Zhang, & Guy, 2013).

The toy keys have captured this infant’s attention. Infants are more attentive to dynamic stimuli—stimuli that change over tim—than to static, unchanging stimuli.

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Figure 5.5 Information Processing System

By around 10 weeks of age, infants show gains in attention. As infants’ capacities for attention increase, so do their preferences for complex stimuli. For example, in one experiment, 3- to 13-month-old infants were shown displays that included a range of static and moving stimuli (Courage, Reynolds, & Richards, 2006). From about 6½ months of age, infants’ looking time varied with stimulus complexity, decreasing for simple stimuli such as dot patterns, increasing slightly for complex stimuli such as faces, and increasing more for very complex stimuli such as video clips (Courage et al., 2006). Overall, looking time peaked at 14 weeks of age and dropped steadily, demonstrating infants’ growing cognitive efficiency. As infants become more efficient at scanning and processing visual information, they require less exposure to stimuli to habituate.

Recently, researchers have begun using brain imaging techniques to measure infants’ brain activity because the development of infant attention is thought to be closely related to neurological development in the areas underlying attentional control (Reynolds, 2015). In response to tasks that challenge attention, infants show activity in the frontal cortex (used for thinking and planning) that is diffuse (widely spread) at 5.5 months of age but more specific or localized by 7.5 months of age (Richards, 2010).