Attention-orienting and attention-holding effects of faces were investigated in a sample of 64 children, aged 4 to 8 months old. A visual preference task was used, in which pairs of faces and toys were presented in eight 10-second trials. Effects of age and sitting-ability were examined. Attention-orienting toward faces was measured using the…

The effect of background television on 6- and 12-month-olds' attention during 20 min of toy play was examined. During the first or second half of the session, a clip from a variety of commonly available television programs was presented. The duration and frequency of infants' looks to the toys and to the television indicated that regardless of age…

Background: The increased interest in social interaction in Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS) is evident from infancy onwards, together not only with increased empathy, positive interpersonal bias, but also with social disinhibition. Previous studies have described behavioural and emotional problems as being widely represented in WBS. There is…

Examined the effect of heart rate and behavioral measures of attention on infants' distractibility. Found longer distraction latencies during attentional engagement as defined by heart rate changes or behavior than for inattentive periods. Infants had longest distraction latencies when heart rate and behavior measures both indicated engagement.…

Three experiments examined infants' perceptions of their own leg movements as presented to them via online video that varied the spatial orientation and directionality of movement. The infants looked significantly longer and generated significantly more leg activity while looking at the view displaying a left-right inversion than while looking at…

Examined visual fixation in infants 6 months to 2 years old for fit with theory of attentional inertia. Found that fixations had lognormal distribution, heart rate decreased during a look, and heart rate returned to prestimulus levels immediately before look offset. Older children showed different looking patterns to two types of stimuli; younger…

Visual fixations were recorded in newborn, 4-, and 8-week-old human infants as they scanned displays that varied in contour length, size, number, and a new metric, CVAL (based on Contour Variability, Amount and Location). One of the findings was that both contour length and CVAL separately accounted for approximatel1 95 of looking-duration…

Discusses changes occurring in two-, four-, and six-month-old infants' visual attention span, through a series of experiments examining their ability to orient to peripheral visual stimuli. The results obtained were consistent with the hypothesis that infants get faster with age in shifting attention to a spatial location. (AA)

The authors used the Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence (J. F. Fagan, L. T. Singer, J. E. Montie, & P. A. Shepherd, 1986) to examine preferences for novelty and to evaluate several indicators of attention (off- and on-task indexes and durations) in 6- and 9-month-old infants who had been prenatally exposed to cigarette smoke only or to cocaine plus…