SUSTAINED ATTENTION IN INFANTS AND YOUNG CHILDREN

拟议研究的总体目标是调查 发展婴儿和学龄前儿童的持续注意力， 评估稳定的个体差异的程度，并 制定注意力的措施，这些措施将在基本和 临床研究 除了目前资助的一项纵向研究， 注意力和冲动控制，提出了四个项目。 两起涉及 不同类型的持续注意力：1）注意力保持为 获取信息或解决问题的目的; 2）注意力 对即将发生的事件保持预期，即警惕。 这两个项目分别涉及婴儿和学龄前儿童， 处理好两种注意力之间的相互关系， 他们对分心的抵抗力，以及个体差异的问题， 和连续性。 这两个项目都建立在以前的工作基础上， 需要开发新的研究注意力的程序。 具体而言，这些新程序包括类似的警戒任务， 现在用于年龄较大的儿童，在下半年用于婴儿 第一年，并向下延长连续性能测试 供两岁的儿童使用。 另外两个项目是 使用注意力测量作为结果的临床研究 变量 一个是研究治疗对大脑功能的影响 中度铅中毒儿童的行为;另一个是一项研究 新生儿脑功能障碍的具体方面的后果， 认知发展 所有拟议的研究应导致 我们对注意力控制的理解的理论进展， 研究早期注意力偏差的临床有用技术。

The overall goals of the proposed research are to investigate the development of sustained attention in infants and preschool children, to assess the extent to which there are stable individual differences, and to develop measures of attention that will be of use in both basic and clinical research. In addition to a currently funded longitudinal study of attention and impulse control, four projects are proposed. Two concern different types of sustained attention: 1) attention maintained for the purpose of acquiring information or solving a problem; and 2) attention maintained in anticipation of an event about to occur, that is, vigilance. These two projects involve infants and preschoolers, respectively, but both deal with the relationship of the two kinds of attention to each other, their resistance to distraction, and the issue of individual differences and continuity. Both of these projects build on previous work, but also require the development of new procedures for studying attention. Specifically, these new procedures include an analogue of vigilance tasks, now used with older children, for use with infants in the second half of the first year, and a downward extension of the continuous performance test for use with children as young as two years. The other two projects are clinical investigations that use measures of attention as outcome variables. One is a study of the effects of treatment on brain function and behavior in moderately lead intoxicated children; the other is a study of the consequences of neonatal brain dysfunction on specific aspects of cognitive development. All of the proposed studies should lead to theoretical advances in our understanding of attentional control and to clinically useful techniques for the study of early deviations in attention.