Converging Behavioral and Neural Measures of Attention in Human Infants

注意力是所有感官输入都必须通过的过滤器。因此，注意力是通向 感知、学习和记忆。目前对婴儿期注意力的理解建立在以下研究的基础上 测量视觉刺激的注视方向和持续时间。这个项目调查的可能性 婴儿视觉注意力的一定比例构成了主动加工的缺失，这要么是由于空白 盯着或注意被引导到外围的。如果这一假设是正确的，那么目前发表在 以婴儿长相为基础的文学作品可能不能准确地描述婴儿的注意力，从而不能准确地描述婴儿的注意力。 心理功能的多个领域的加工。本项目的主要目标是 使用同步融合测量来评估人类婴儿的显性和隐性视觉注意，并 将这些措施与典型婴儿多感觉整合的结果的个体差异联系起来 知觉学习/辨别任务。将通过以下方式获得明显的婴儿视觉注意力测量 使用人类观察者和商业眼睛跟踪器的标准方法。隐蔽视觉注意的测量 将利用脑电频率标记技术，提供大脑对 闪烁的刺激(或该刺激周围的环状物)，可以揭示隐蔽的注意力何时减少 (或缺席)即使是因为婴儿只是盯着看或在指挥，而将明显的注意力引向刺激 注意其他地方。我们的融合措施将提供婴儿看起来的时刻变化 一个或两个同时刺激和大脑对不同时间闪烁刺激的反应 频率。使用时间分辨多元回归方法，我们将估计显性和隐性的模式 注意在编码后的后测中最能预测知觉和记忆表现 婴儿面孔和发声匹配、婴儿学习和辨别的实验阶段 视觉对象的分类，以及视觉对象的婴儿分类。总体而言，当前的项目承诺提供一个 一种方法创新的方法，比目前提取更纯粹的婴儿期积极注意力 可能是通过同时接触到隐蔽注意力的神经标记。这反过来又将提供一个强大的 主动注意在婴儿期多个认知功能领域中的作用 典型和非典型人群。

Attention is the filter through which all sensory inputs must pass. Therefore, attention is the gateway for perception, learning, and memory. Current understanding of attention in infancy is based on studies that measure the direction and duration of visual fixation of visual stimuli. This project investigates the likelihood that some proportion of infant visual attention constitutes the absence of active processing either due to a blank stare or to attention being directed to the periphery. If this hypothesis is correct then current findings in the literature based on infant looking may provide an inaccurate picture of infant attention and, thus, of infant processing in multiple domains of psychological functioning. The principal goal of the present project is to employ simultaneous converging measures to assess overt and covert visual attention in human infants and to relate those measures to individual differences in outcome on classic infant multisensory integration and perceptual learning/discrimination tasks. Measures of overt infant visual attention will be obtained with standard methods using both human observers and commercial eye trackers. Measures of covert visual attention will utilize an EEG frequency-tagging technique which provides a continuous measure of the brain's response to a flickering stimulus (or an annulus surrounding that stimulus) and can reveal when covert attention is reduced (or absent) even when overt attention is directed to a stimulus either because the infant is just staring or directing attention elsewhere. Our converging measures will provide moment-to-moment changes in infant looking at either one or two simultaneous stimuli and brain responses to the stimuli flickering at different temporal frequencies. Using time resolved multivariate regression, we will estimate the patterns of overt and covert attention that best predict the perceptual and memory performance during a post-test following the encoding phase in experiments examining infant matching of faces and vocalizations, infant learning and discrimination of visual objects, and infant categorization of visual objects. Overall, the current project promises to provide a methodologically innovative way to extract a purer measure of active attention in infancy than is currently possible through concurrent access to a neural marker of covert attention. This, in turn, will provide a powerful new tool for assessing the role of active attention in multiple domains of cognitive functioning in infancy in both typical and atypical populations.