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

总结/摘要 照顾者既有社会回报，也是学习输入的重要来源， 对他们的照顾者的注意力超过其他竞争性刺激对于有效的早期学习至关重要。变更处理 在几种非典型的发展环境中，社会奖励的作用是普遍的，包括在婴儿中， 抑郁的母亲和被诊断患有自闭症谱系障碍（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， 患有母亲抑郁症和自闭症为了了解注意力机制是如何在非典型的 发展，有必要确定其规范发展的特点。两种不同的注意力机制， 注意定向（将注意力转移到选择信息）和注意保持（保持对过程的注意力 信息），共同发挥作用，塑造早期学习。然而，过去的研究表明， (i.e.,社会动机因素）对发展注意力的影响，只研究了婴儿对 照顾者也没有检查定向。成年人对动机显著的刺激表现出强烈的定向偏见， 但研究早期注意力定向的研究并没有涉及社会动机因素， 强调基于知觉显著性和内源性控制的机制。因此，社会的作用-- 婴儿注意定向典型发展中的动机因素尚不清楚。拟议研究 将调查婴儿对照顾者和陌生人的注意力偏差的发展和预测因素， 从事突出的行为。研究1将使用眼动追踪纵向表征受试者内 从4到8个月大，照顾者与陌生人面孔的注意定向和持有偏见的变化（目的 1）。我们将使用额外的措施集中注意力和行为编码的婴儿照顾者的互动 为了确定护理质量和内源性注意力控制在多大程度上预测这些变化， 注意力偏差随时间的变化（目标2）。研究2将确定在多大程度上， 注意力超出社交伙伴的熟悉程度（目标3）。在四个实验中，我们将评估是否 婴儿的优先定向一般化到从事非典型行为的陌生人（即，出现 经常使用婴儿指导的语言，对他们的行为做出偶然的反应）。研究广泛 记录了早期婴儿与看护者的互动对社会情感发展至关重要， 我们对这些经历如何影响认知技能的发展知之甚少。通过表征 婴儿对看护者的注意力偏差的发展，并确定这些个体差异的预测因素。 偏见，这项工作将最终促进我们对社会奖励处理机制的理解， 在典型和非典型发育中，婴儿早期对照顾者的注意和学习。

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.