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Updated: Jul 1, 2025
Classical Short-Delay Eyeblink Conditioning in One-Year-Old Children
Published on: September 1, 2018
Attentional blink in infants under 7 months
Suetping Lee1, Shuma Tsurumi2, So Kanazawa3
1Department of Psychology, Japan Women's University, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112-8681, Japan; Department of Psychology, Chuo University, Hachioji-shi, Tokyo 192-0393, Japan.
Insights
Infants under 7 months do not show an attentional blink, suggesting limited working memory capacity. Older infants (over 180 days) can process single visual targets, unlike younger infants.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Attentional blink (AB) is a phenomenon where the ability to detect a second target is impaired following a first target.
- AB is observed in 7-month-old infants, suggesting adult-like working memory capacity.
- The AB phenomenon in infants younger than 7 months remains poorly understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate attentional blink (AB) in 5- and 6-month-old infants.
- To explore the working memory capacity and target consolidation abilities in pre-attentional blink infants.
- To determine the age threshold for AB manifestation in early infancy.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments were conducted using a visual stream paradigm with varying target lags (200 ms and 800 ms).
- Experiment 1 assessed AB in 5- and 6-month-olds with two targets.
- Experiment 2 evaluated single-target identification speed in infants younger and older than 180 days.
Main Results:
- No attentional blink was observed in 5- and 6-month-old infants at either short or long lags.
- Infants older than 180 days could identify a single target presented at 100 ms speed.
- Infants younger than 180 days failed to identify a single target at 100 ms speed.
Conclusions:
- The absence of attentional blink in infants under 7 months suggests immature working memory capacity.
- A developmental threshold around 180 days exists for processing rapidly presented visual information.
- Working memory limitations likely explain the lack of attentional blink in younger infants.
Abstract:
Attentional blink manifests in infants at 7 months of age, indicating that the working memory capacity of 7-month-olds is comparable to that of adults. However, attentional blink in infants under 7 months is not well understood. In this study, we conducted two experiments to investigate attentional blink in 5- and 6-month-old infants. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that attentional blinks were not observed with either a short lag (200 ms) or a long lag (800 ms). This suggests that 5- and 6-month-olds are unable to consolidate both targets regardless of the temporal distance between the two. We then split the infants into two groups by their age and conducted Experiment 2 with infants aged younger and older than 180 days to compare their consolidating ability to observe whether they could recognize a single item at 100-ms speed by presenting the same visual stream that was used in Experiment 1 except that one target was eliminated. The results showed that infants over 180 days of age could identify a single target in the visual stream at 100-ms presentation speed, whereas infants under 180 days could not. The findings of the current study indicate that the limitation of working memory capacity in infants under 7 months of age is a possible reason for the lack of attentional blink.
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