Hunnius, S. (2007). The early development of visual attention and its implications for social and cognitive development.

Question 1

Looking behavior plays a crucial role in the daily life of an infant and forms the basis for cognitive and social development. The infant’s visual attentional systems undergo rapid development during the first few months of life. During the last decennia, the study of visual attentional development in infants has received increasing interest. Several reliable measures to investigate the early development of attentional processes have been developed, and currently a number of new methods are giving fresh impetus to the field. Research on overt and covert as well as exogenously and endogenously controlled attention shifts is presented. The development of gaze shifts to peripheral targets, covert attention, and visual scanning behavior is treated. Whereas most attentional mechanisms in very young infants are thought to be mediated mainly by subcortical structures, cortical mechanisms become increasingly more functional throughout the first months. Different accounts of the neurophysiological underpinnings of attentional processes and their developmental changes are discussed. Finally, a number of studies investigating the implications of attentional development for early cognitive and social development are presented.

Answer 1

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Question 2

hoe verschillen de eyemovements tussen young en older infants

Answer 2

• young: very slow and sluggish, stare into random places
• older: quickly scanning, alternate intense inspections with brief look aways, alert

Question 3

vision plays a crucial role in the daily life of an infant:

Answer 3

• kunnen niet objecten pakken of manipuleren: alleen kijken
• communiceren met caregivers

Question 4

earliest method of studying eye movements and visual attention

Answer 4

the simple observation of gaze (still very common)

Question 5

2 important paradigms in infant psychology, based on the observation of looking behaviour

Answer 5

• preferential looking paradigm (two stimuli, a reliably longer looking duration to one of hem is interpreted as evidence that the infant discriminates the two
• the visual habituation paradigm (infants tendency to look at novel rather than familiar stimuli and to show a decrease in looking time with continued exposure to the same stimulus)

Question 6

two more precise methods of measuring eye movements and fixations

Answer 6

• electro-oculography (EOG)
• corneal-reflection photograpy

Question 7

EOG =

Answer 7

based on measuring the change in electrical potential caused by the rotation of the eye

• sensitive to artifacts because it requires electrodes to be attached to the subjects face
• only provides data on the relative displacement of the eye and not on where the subject is looking

Question 8

corneal reflection eye-tracking

Answer 8

an (infrared) light source is used to create a reflection off the front surface of the eyeball. The reflection is displaced when the subject moves fixation, and the information about the relative position of the corneal reflection with respect to the center of the pupil and its change are used to determine whether an eye movement took place.

• has to be individually calibrated to be able to map the output data

Question 9

3 ways eye-movement behaviour provides extra information (compared to just looking measures)

Answer 9

measures of fixation locations, fixation durations, and the time of occurrence of fixation shifts or anticipatory eye movements

Question 10

heart rate measures=

Answer 10

Heart rate (HR) is controlled directly by the
autonomic nervous system, which is closely linked to the cerebral cortex where higher level cognitive processes, including attentional processes, are mediated. As a consequence of the connection between these systems, changes in HR measures occur in association with changes in attentional status and sensory and cognitive processing. HR measures, such as changes in cardiac cycle length or respiratory sinus arrhythmia, have therefore
frequently been used to investigate attentional processes during visual tasks in adults

Question 11

hoe hebben heart rate measures ons geholpen

Answer 11

The HR-based differentiation between sustained attention, when an infant is focusing attention on an object or stimulus and is actively processing it, and attention termination, when the infant is still looking but is no longer encoding the stimulus (Richards and Casey, 1991), has made a particularly important contribution to our understanding of infants’ attentional mechanisms and looking behavior during visual tasks.

Question 12

marker tasks=

Answer 12

This method uses behavioral tasks previously used in neurophysiological or brain imaging studies of adults or non-human primates whose neurological basis is thus relatively well established. Investigations of infants’ performance on the same tasks at different ages and in various contexts provide insight into the interrelations between developmental changes in observable behavior and brain structures.

• However, the approach has been criticized as the same behavior might be mediated by different neurological structures at different stages of development.
• Further, the fact that the marker task approach focuses primarily on neurological underpinnings to explain performance without taking into account other variables such as endogenous states, has been commented on

Question 13

measures of brain activity that are successful with children

Answer 13

• electro-encephalography (EEG): voornamelijk het gebruik van event-related potentials
• functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
• near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)

Question 14

verschil EEG en fMRI & NIRS

Answer 14

Unlike EEG, which measures neural activity directly, these fMRI and NIRS are based on the cerebral hemodynamic responses correlated with neural activity.

Question 15

fMRI nadelen

Answer 15

The technique has a limited time resolution, requires a very rigid constraint of the infant’s head movements, and also exposes the infant to strong magnetic fields and to intense noise.

Question 16

NIRS vs FMRI

Answer 16

NIRS is less sensitive to the infant’s movements, but measurements might not be as precise as with fMRI.

Question 17

when do eye movements emerge

Answer 17

prenatal development

Question 18

what does early visual orienting look like in newborns

Answer 18

From the first days of their life, when awake and alert, infants selectively attend to different aspects of their visual environment. As newborns, for instance, they preferentially orient to and spend more time looking at a face-like pattern rather than a non-facelike stimulus or a novel rather than a familiar stimulus

Question 19

Shifts of gaze and shifts of attention are tightly associated, although they do not necessarily occur conjointly, and orienting — the aligning of attention with a source of sensory input — does not always have to be directly observable

Answer 19

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Question 20

verschil overt en covert

Answer 20

Whereas eye movements that shift gaze from one location to another are named overt orienting, in covert orienting, foveation and visual attention do not coincide, and eyes, head, and body may remain stationary while attention shifts

Question 21

verschil exogenous en endogenous shifts of attention

Answer 21

While exogenously controlled shifts of attention are automatic, as when infants orient to a salient stimulus appearing in their visual field, endogenously triggered orienting involves voluntary or strategic attention shifts to locations of interest

Question 22

overzicht overt, covert, exogenous en endogenous

Answer 22

overt & exo = localization of stimuli in peripheral visual field, disengagement
overt & endo = visual scanning
covert & exo = behavioural facilitation and inhibition
covert & endo = behavioural facilitation and inhibition

Question 23

visual grasp reflex=

Answer 23

The sudden onset of a stimulus in the peripheral visual field triggers relatively automatic saccades, these are called visual grasp reflex

Question 24

hoe ontwikkelt overt orienting zich

Answer 24

dit is eerst al aanwezig, maar niet efficient. duurt best lang, adult-like performance komt na school age

Question 25

disengagement task

Answer 25

1. gaze shifting condition: central stimulus appears first, but disappears when the peripheral target is shown
2. disengagement condition: central stimulus appears first, peripheral target is added. dus je moet echt disengagen van die eerste central stimulus

Question 26

inhibition of return (IOR) task

Answer 26

1. centering stimulus
2. short peripheral cue next to the central stimulus (100 ms)
3. centering stimulus (peripheral cue dus even weg)
4. alleen de target

novelty bias: RT is higher if the stimulus appears at the same side, because we expect it to be at the other (novel) side

Question 27

hoe is disengagement in infants

Answer 27

Infants between approximately 1 and 4 months of age have been reported to have difficulty looking away from a stimulus, once their attention has been engaged. As a consequence, they may exhibit long periods of staring. By 4 months of age, infants are able to move their attention and gaze easily and rapidly, and staring behavior becomes rare.

namen voor die periode: obligatory attention, attention tropism, sticky fixation

Question 28

metafoor voor covert attention

Answer 28

the focus of attention has been compared to a beam of light that can be shifted between different locations independently from movements of the eye

Question 29

beschrijving covert: waarom hebben we dit

Answer 29

During fixation of a stimulus, rapid shifts of covert attention take place in order to select the next location to look at.

Question 30

which paradigm is used to prove covert attention

Answer 30

spatial cuing paradigm

Question 31

spatial cueing paradigm

Answer 31

While infants are looking at a central stimulus, a short peripheral cue is presented. As young infants are very unlikely to shift their gaze away from the central stimulus they are currently fixating, only a covert shift of attention can be carried out to the location of the cue. The central fixation stimulus subsequently disappears, and, following a delay, a target is presented either at the cued location or on the opposite side of the central fixation stimulus. The occurrence of facilitation or inhibition is then interpreted as evidence for the ability to shift attention covertly.

Question 32

vanaf wanneer covert attention

Answer 32

• facilitation vanaf ong 4 maanden; whereas infants of 3 months seem to show facilitation mainly as a result of automatic saccadic programming, infants from the age of 4 months might show both facilitation and IOR as a result of a shift of covert attention.
• inhibition vanaf een paar dagen al! After overt orienting to a cue, a few-days-old infants tended to look less frequently and more slowly in the direction of the preceding saccade. These findings suggest that one of the mechanisms involved in overt IOR is already functional in neonates and is thus ready long before the ability to shift attention covertly emerges.

Question 33

visual scanning in young infants vs older people

Answer 33

Once very young infants have oriented to a stimulus, they scan it actively. However, their scanning patterns differ from those of older infants and adults. They tend to examine only limited parts of the stimulus, and to ignore other stimuli in their visual field. During the first weeks of life, infants have also been shown to look at the most salient features of a stimulus pattern, such as edges or outer contours, rather than (stationary) inner parts of a stimulus (contour salience effect).

From 2–3 months of age, infants start to explore a stimulus under examination more consistently and more extensively. They fixate more locations and various features, exhibit more brief fixations, and scan more rapidly over an array of stimulus figures.

Question 34

young infants’ ability to tailor their scanning behavior to the characteristics of the stimuli under examination evolves around ….. of age. As infants grow older, they attain increasing intentional control over their eye movements. By …. months of age, they are able to examine their environment in an efficient and flexible way.

Answer 34

3 months

4–5 months

Question 35

dus wat kunnen ze qua visual scanning na 4 maanden?

Answer 35

They can shift gaze rapidly and reliably between and within visual stimuli and are able to direct their gaze to relevant locations. Eye movements are now generated in accordance with the strategic demands of ongoing information processing and when familiar stimuli are scanned, recursive scanning patterns can be observed

Question 36

verschil young infants and older infants wat betreft faces

Answer 36

When infants younger than 2 months of age scan faces, they tend to restrict their fixations to the perimeter of the face, whereas infants older than 2–3 months are more likely to also inspect the internal facial features, especially the eyes and, to a much lesser extent, the mouth.

But: When presented with a face that is talking and moving naturally, even infants as young as 6 weeks of age direct their gaze at the internal features of the face

Question 37

individual differences in the efficiency of disengagement of attention form the basis for the relationship between look duration and cognitive performance in infants

Answer 37

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Question 38

We know that attention patterns in early infancy are related to later cognitive functioning and that infants’ looking duration during habituation shows continuity with cognition in later childhood.

Answer 38

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Question 39

attention and emotion regulation

Answer 39

orienting away (to the mother or an object) during a stressful situation was associated with a decrease in negative affect in 5-month-old infants. The ability to redirect attention away from distressing stimuli has similarly been shown to be related to lower levels of negative affect in infants of 13.5 months of age

Question 40

As mentioned before, early face-to-face interaction also calls on the infants’ regulation skills. Infants shift their gaze regularly in order to regulate visual input and to avoid an unpleasant or too intense interaction

Answer 40

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