Converging Behavioral and Neural Measures of Attention in Human Infants

注意力是所有感官输入必须通过的过滤器。因此，注意力是 感知、学习和记忆。目前对婴儿期注意力的理解是基于以下研究， 测量视觉刺激的视觉注视的方向和持续时间。这个项目调查了 婴儿视觉注意力的某些部分构成了主动处理的缺失， 凝视或者注意力被引导到边缘。如果这一假设是正确的， 基于婴儿注视的文献可能提供了一个不准确的婴儿注意力的图片，因此，婴儿的注意力， 在心理功能的多个领域进行处理。本项目的主要目标是 采用同时收敛的方法来评估人类婴儿的显性和隐性视觉注意力， 将这些措施与经典婴儿多感觉整合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的测量结果： 使用人类观察者和商业眼动仪的标准方法。内隐视觉注意的测量 将利用EEG频率标记技术，该技术提供了对大脑反应的连续测量， 闪烁的刺激（或围绕该刺激的环），并可以揭示何时内隐注意力减少 (or即使当明显的注意力被引导到刺激物上，因为婴儿只是盯着或指挥 注意别处。我们的融合措施将提供每时每刻的变化， 一个或两个同时刺激和大脑对刺激的反应在不同的时间闪烁 频率.使用时间分辨多元回归，我们将估计显性和隐性的模式， 在编码后的后测中，最能预测感知和记忆表现的注意力 阶段的实验研究婴儿的面孔和发声匹配，婴儿的学习和歧视 以及婴儿对视觉对象的分类。总的来说，目前的项目承诺提供一个 在方法上创新的方式，提取一个纯粹的措施，积极注意在婴儿期比目前 可能是通过同时接触内隐注意力的神经标记。这反过来将提供一个强大的 一种新的工具，用于评估积极注意力在婴儿期认知功能多个领域中的作用， 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.