The development of sustained attention in infants

项目摘要/摘要 幼儿注意由多个阶段组成，包括刺激定向、持续注意和注意终止。 这些阶段指示大脑的整体觉醒/警觉功能，并调节大脑皮层的特定注意力系统。 PI使用心率作为警觉/唤醒系统的指标，并显示了注意力对各种类型的影响 婴幼儿信息处理系统。这是用行为方法来测量注意力和用 心理生理学和神经成像方法，以检查持续注意对特定大脑过程的影响。 在前一批赠款期间，一个显著的进步是开发了使用婴儿结构磁共振成像进行现实分析的工具 用于事件相关电位皮层来源分析的婴幼儿头部和大脑模型。当前的项目将使用这些工具来研究 持续注意与内源性空间线索注意相关脑区之间的关系 具有皮质来源分析的ERP组件的生成器。该项目还将研究注意力对 大脑皮层对面部刺激的反应。在之前的授权期内开发的工具将得到改进，以改善皮质 来源分析，将程序推广到在没有结构性磁共振成像的婴儿中进行皮质来源分析，以及 推广到其他婴儿神经成像方法。

Project Summary / Abstract Infant attention consists of multiple phases, including stimulus orienting, sustained attention and attention termination. These phases index overall arousal/alertness functions of the brain, and modulate specific attention systems in the cortex. The PI has used heart rate as an index of the alertness/arousal system and shown the effects of attention on a wide variety of infant information processing systems. This has been done with behavioral methods to measure attention and with psychophysiological and neuroimaging methods to examine the effect of sustained attention on specific brain processes. A significant advance in the prior grant period was the development of tools to use infant structural MRIs for realistic models of the infant head and brain for cortical source analysis of ERP. The current project will use these tools to study the relation between sustained attention and brain areas involved in endogenously-cued spatial attention by identifying the generators of ERP components with cortical source analysis. The project also will examine the effects of attention on the cortical response to face stimuli. The tools developed in the prior grant period will be refined to improve the cortical source analysis, generalize the procedures to doing cortical source analysis in infants without structural MRIs, and generalized to other infant neuroimaging methods.