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Foundations of attention sharing: Orienting and responding to attention in term and preterm 5-month-old infants

Merideth Gattis1, Alice Winstanley1, Rebecca Sperotto1

  • 1School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK.

Infant Behavior & Development
|September 14, 2020
PubMed

Insights

Infant attention development, influenced by maturity, shows distinct patterns for orienting to and responding to people versus objects. This research highlights attention

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Infant Studies

Background:

  • Attention is crucial for cognitive, perceptual, and socioemotional development.
  • Understanding how attention develops in infants is key to understanding broader developmental trajectories.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the role of maturation in infant attention.
  • To examine how infants (term and preterm) and their mothers orient to and respond to attention during social interactions.
  • To explore differences in attention to people versus objects.

Main Methods:

  • Observation of 104 5-month-old infants and their mothers during social interactions.
  • Utilized a fine-grained coding system for parallel comparisons of infant and maternal attention.
  • Employed sequential analysis to assess infant and maternal responses to attention.

Main Results:

  • Orienting to and responding to attention varied significantly between attention directed towards people and objects.
  • The relationship between infant maturity and attention differed based on the type of attention (orienting vs. responding) and target (people vs. objects).
  • Maturity was found to be a contributing factor in both orienting and responding to attention.

Conclusions:

  • Infant attention is not a homogenous construct; orienting and responding to attention are distinct processes.
  • Maturity plays a significant role in the development of infant attention.
  • Findings have implications for understanding attention's influence on cognitive and communicative development in infants.

Keywords:
AttentionContingencyInfancyParentingPrematurityResponsiveness

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