Longitudinal investigation of endogenous and social-motivational predictors of infants' attention to caregivers

摘要/摘要 照顾者既是社会回报，也是学习投入的重要来源，也是婴儿区分优先顺序的能力 关注他们的照顾者而不是其他相互竞争的刺激对于有效的早期学习至关重要。变更加工 在一些非典型的发育环境中，社会奖励是常见的，包括在 抑郁的母亲和被诊断为自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)的儿童。这降低了对 社会奖励可能会扰乱婴儿对照顾者的注意力，并导致较差的学习结果 患有母性抑郁症和自闭症。了解注意力机制是如何在非典型肺炎患者中被打乱的 发展方面，有必要确定其规范性发展的特点。两种截然不同的注意力机制， 注意定向(将注意力转移到选择的信息)和注意保持(保持对过程的注意 信息)，共同作用形成早期学习。然而，过去的研究将照料经历联系在一起 (即，社会动机因素)对发展注意力的影响只考察了婴儿的注意持有偏差。 照顾者没有也检查定向。成年人对激励性显著刺激表现出强烈的定向偏见， 但是，研究早期注意力定向的研究并没有解决社会动机因素，而是 强调基于知觉突显和内生控制的机制。因此，社会的作用-- 幼儿注意定向的典型发展过程中的动机因素尚不清楚。拟议的研究 将调查婴儿对照顾者和陌生人的注意力偏向的发展和预测因素 从事显著的照看行为。研究1将使用眼球跟踪来纵向描述被试内部的特征 4-8个月大婴儿对照顾者与陌生人面孔的注意力定向和持有偏见的变化(目标 1)。我们将使用其他测量集中注意力和婴儿与照顾者互动的行为编码 为了确定护理质量和内源性注意控制在多大程度上预测这些变化 注意力随着时间的推移而偏向(目标2)。研究2将确定照顾行为在多大程度上推动婴儿 超越社交伙伴熟悉度的关注(目标3)。在四个实验中，我们将评估 婴儿的优先定向一般适用于从事照顾者典型行为的陌生人(即 经常使用婴儿指导的言语，对他们的行为做出应急反应)。研究已经广泛开展 早期婴儿与照顾者的互动对社会情绪发展至关重要，但 我们对这些经历如何影响认知技能的发展知之甚少。通过将 婴幼儿对照顾者注意偏向的发展及其个体差异的预测因素 偏见，这项工作最终将促进我们对将社会奖励处理与 婴幼儿早期对典型发育和非典型发育照顾者的关注和学习。

SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Caregivers are both socially rewarding and a crucial source of learning input, and infants’ ability to prioritize attention to their caregiver over other competing stimuli is critical for effective early learning. Altered processing of social reward is common across several atypical developmental contexts, including among infants of depressed mothers and children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This reduced sensitivity to social reward may disrupt infants’ attention to caregivers and contribute to poorer learning outcomes associated with maternal depression and ASD. To understand how attention mechanisms become disrupted in atypical development it is necessary to characterize their normative development. Two distinct attention mechanisms, attention orienting (shifting attention to select information) and attention holding (maintaining attention to process information), function together to shape early learning. However, past research linking caregiving experiences (i.e., social-motivational factors) to developing attention has only examined infants’ attention holding biases to caregivers without also examining orienting. Adults show robust orienting biases to motivationally salient stimuli, but research investigating early attention orienting has not addressed social-motivational factors and instead emphasizes mechanisms based on perceptual salience and endogenous control. As a result, the role of social- motivational factors in the typical development of infants’ attention orienting is unknown. The proposed research will investigate the development and predictors of infants’ attention biases to caregivers and strangers who engage in salient caregiving behaviors. Study 1 will use eye tracking to longitudinally characterize within-subject changes in attention orienting and holding biases to caregiver vs. stranger faces from 4- to 8-months of age (Aim 1). We will use additional measures of focused attention and behavioral coding of infant-caregiver interactions to determine the extent to which caregiving quality and endogenous attention control predict these changes in attention biases over time (Aim 2). Study 2 will determine the extent to which caregiving behaviors drive infants’ attention beyond the familiarity of the social partner (Aim 3). Across four experiments, we will assess whether infants’ preferential orienting generalizes to strangers who engage in caregiver-typical behaviors (i.e., appearing frequently, using infant-directed speech, responding contingently to their behavior). Research has extensively documented that early infant-caregiver interactions are critically important for social-emotional development, but we know far less about how these experiences influence developing cognitive skills. By characterizing the development of infants’ attention biases to caregivers and identifying predictors of individual variance in these biases, this work will ultimately promote our understanding of mechanisms that link social reward processing to infants’ early attention to and learning from caregivers in typical and atypical development.