Disengaging visual attention in the infant and adult

Attention deficits in Amblyopia: A narrative review

Amblyopia has effects on vision that extend from the processing of low-level visual features to higher level functions such as visual attention. In this narrative review, we focus on the impact of amblyopia on visual attention. A structured literature search revealed 28 articles reporting comparisons between amblyopia and normal vision control groups for a variety of visual attention tasks. Several of these articles also included neuroimaging measures. A review of these articles suggested that amblyopia does not affect behavioral performance of tasks with a low attentional load, such as cuing tasks, but deficits emerge for tasks with high demands on visual attention such as multiple object tracking. Deficits are not limited to the amblyopic eye but are also evident under fellow eye and binocular viewing conditions suggesting that abnormal early binocular visual experience can fundamentally alter the development of visual attention. Overall, the current literature suggests that amblyopia is associated with reduced visual attention resources. We raise the possibility that this attention resource deficit may be partially associated with an attentional demand for suppression of the amblyopic eye.

The impact of rhythm on visual attention disengagement in newborns and 2-month-old infants

Rhythm entrains attention in both human and non-human animals. Here, the ontogenetic origins of this effect were investigated in newborns (Experiment 1; N = 30, 16 females) and 2-month-old infants (Experiment 2; N = 30, 17 females). Visuospatial attentional disengagement was tested in an overlap task where a static peripheral stimulus (S2) appeared while a central rhythmic, non-rhythmic or static stimulus (S1) remained visible on the screen. Results indicated a developmental pattern, with 2-month-olds, but not newborns, showing equally faster disengagement of fixation when S1 was static or rhythmic compared to non-rhythmic. Infants' preferential looking behaviour indicate that this difference in saccadic latencies was not due to stimulus salience (Experiment 3; N = 30, 18 females). Results point to the importance of the temporal structure of dynamic stimuli as a specific feature that modulates attentional disengagement at 2 months of age.

Genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in visual attention and oculomotor control in early infancy

Infants differ in their level of eye movement control, which at the extreme could be linked to autism. We assessed eye movements in 450 twins (225 pairs, 57% monozygotic, 46% female, aged 5-6 months) using the gap-overlap eye-tracking task. Shorter latency in the gap condition was associated with having more parent-rated autistic traits at 2 years. Latency across the task's three conditions was primarily explained by one highly heritable latent factor likely representing individual differences in basic oculomotor efficiency and/or in visual information processing. Additionally, disengagement of attention was linked to unique genetic factors, suggesting that genetic factors involved in visual attention are different from those involved in basic visual information processing and oculomotor efficiency.

The modulating effect of gestational age on attentional disengagement in toddlers

Gestational Age (GA) at birth plays a crucial role in identifying potential vulnerabilities to long-term difficulties in cognitive and behavioral development. The present study aims to explore the influence of gestational age on the efficiency of early visual attention orienting, as a potential marker for the development of specific high-level socio-cognitive skills. We administered the Gap-Overlap task to measure the attentional orienting and disengagement performance of 16-month-olds born between the 34th and 41st weeks of gestation. Our findings indicate that GA might be a significant predictor of attentional disengagement performance, with lower GAs associated with slower orienting of visual attention in the gap condition. Additionally, we discuss a possible influence of endogenous attention control on disengagement accuracy at this age, particularly among full-term infants. Overall, the findings highlight the role of GA as a key factor in evaluating early visual attention development, acting as a marker for detecting early vulnerabilities.

Foraging and inertia: Understanding the developmental dynamics of overt visual attention

During early life, we develop the ability to choose what we focus on and what we ignore, allowing us to regulate perception and action in complex environments. But how does this change influence how we spontaneously allocate attention to real-world objects during free behaviour? Here, in this narrative review, we examine this question by considering the time dynamics of spontaneous overt visual attention, and how these develop through early life. Even in early childhood, visual attention shifts occur both periodically and aperiodically. These reorientations become more internally controlled as development progresses. Increasingly with age, attention states also develop self-sustaining attractor dynamics, known as attention inertia, in which the longer an attention episode lasts, the more the likelihood increases of its continuing. These self-sustaining dynamics are driven by amplificatory interactions between engagement, comprehension, and distractibility. We consider why experimental measures show decline in sustained attention over time, while real-world visual attention often demonstrates the opposite pattern. Finally, we discuss multi-stable attention states, where both hypo-arousal (mind-wandering) and hyper-arousal (fragmentary attention) may also show self-sustaining attractor dynamics driven by moment-by-moment amplificatory child-environment interactions; and we consider possible applications of this work, and future directions.

Coregistration of EEG and eye-tracking in infants and developing populations

Infants cannot be instructed where to look; therefore, infant researchers rely on observation of their participant's gaze to make inferences about their cognitive processes. They therefore started studying infant attention in the real world from early on. Developmental researchers were early adopters of methods combining observations of gaze and behaviour with electroencephalography (EEG) to study attention and other cognitive functions. However, the direct combination of eye-tracking methods and EEG to test infants is still rare, as it includes specific challenges. The current article reviews the development of co-registration research in infancy. It points out specific challenges of co-registration in infant research and suggests ways to overcome them. It ends with recommendations for implementing the co-registration of EEG and eye-tracking in infant research to maximise the benefits of the two measures and their combination and to orient on Open Science principles while doing so. In summary, this work shows that the co-registration of EEG and eye-tracking in infant research can be beneficial to studying natural and real-world behaviour despite its challenges.

Evaluations of aggressive chasing interactions by 7-month-old infants

Recent theories of socio-moral development assume that humans evolved a capacity to evaluate others' social actions in different kinds of interactions. Prior infant studies found both reaching and visual preferences for the prosocial over the antisocial agents. However, whether the attribution of either positive or negative valence to agents' actions involved in an aggressive chasing interaction can be inferred by both reaching behaviors and visual attention deployment (i.e., disengagement of visual attention) is still an open question. Here we presented 7-month-old infants (N = 92) with events displaying an aggressive chasing interaction. By using preferential reaching and an attentional task (i.e., overlap paradigm), we assessed whether and how infants evaluate aggressive chasing interactions. The results demonstrated that young infants prefer to reach the victim over the aggressor, but neither agent affects visual attention. Moreover, such reaching preferences emerged only when dynamic cues and emotional face-like features were congruent with agents' social roles. Overall, these findings suggested that infants' evaluations of aggressive interactions are based on infants' sensitivity to some kinematic cues that characterized agents' actions and, especially, to the congruency between such motions and the face-like emotional expressions of the agents.

Visual reflexive attention as a useful measure of development

Cognitive psychology began over three-quarters of a century ago and we have learned a great deal in that time, including concerning the development of cognitive abilities such as perception, attention, and memory, all of which develop across infancy and childhood. Attention is one aspect of cognition that is vital to success in a variety of life activities and, arguably, the foundation of memory, learning, problem solving, decision making, and other cognitive activities. The cognitive abilities of later childhood and adulthood generally appear to depend on the reflexes, abilities, and skills of infancy. Research in developmental cognitive science can help us understand adult cognition and know when to intervene when cognitive function is at risk. This area of research can be challenging because, even in typical development, the course of cognitive development for a particular child does not always improve monotonically. In addition, the typical trajectory of this development has been understood differently from different historical perspectives. Neither the history of thought that has led to our current understanding of attention (including its various types) nor the importance of developmental aspects of attention are frequently covered in training early career researchers, especially those whose primary area of research in not attention. My goal is to provide a review that will be useful especially to those new to research in the subfield of attention. Sustained attention in adults and children has been well-studied, but a review of the history of thought on the development of reflexive attention with a focus on infancy is overdue. Therefore, I draw primarily on historical and modern literature and clarify confusing terminology as it has been used over time. I conclude with examples of how cognitive development research can contribute to scientific and applied progress.

Influence of the environment on the early development of attentional control

The control of visual attention is key to learning and has a foundational role in the development of self-regulated behavior. Basic attention control skills emerge early in life and show a protracted development along childhood. Prior research suggests that attentional development is influenced by environmental factors in early and late childhood. Although, much less information is available about the impact of the early environment on emerging endogenous attention skills during infancy. In the current study we aimed to test the impact of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and home environment (chaos) in the emerging control of orienting in a sample of typically-developing infants. A group of 142 (73 female) 6-month-old infants were longitudinally tested at 6, 9 (n = 122; 60 female) and 16-18 (n = 91; 50 female) months of age using the gap-overlap paradigm. Median saccade latency (mdSL) and disengagement failure (DF) were computed as dependent variables for both overlap and gap conditions. Also, composite scores for a Disengagement Cost Index (DCI) and Disengagement Failure Index (DFI) were computed considering mdSL and DF of each condition, respectively. Families reported SES and chaos in the first and last follow-up sessions. Using Linear Mixed Models with Maximum Likelihood estimation (ML) we found a longitudinal decrease in mdSL in the gap but not in the overlap condition, while DF decreased with age independently of the experimental condition. Concerning early environmental factors, an SES index, parental occupation and chaos at 6 months were found to show a negative correlation with DFI at 16-18 months, although in the former case it was only marginally significant. Hierarchical regression models implementing ML showed that both SES and chaos at 6 months significantly predicted a lower DFI at 16-18 months. Results show a longitudinal progression of endogenous orienting between infancy and toddlerhood. With age, an increased endogenous control of orienting is displayed in contexts where visual disengagement is facilitated. Visual orienting involving attention disengagement in contexts of visual competition do not show changes with age. Moreover, these attentional mechanisms of endogenous control seem to be modulated by early experiences of the individual with the environment.

Visual Short-Term Memory Persists Across Multiple Fixations: An n-Back Approach to Quantifying Capacity in Infants and Adults

Visual short-term memory (STM) is a foundational component of general cognition that develops rapidly during the first year of life. Although previous research has revealed important relations between overt visual fixation and memory formation, it is unknown whether infants can maintain distinct memories for sequentially fixated items or remember nonfixated array items. Participants (5-month-olds, 11-month-olds, and adults; n = 24 at each age) from the United States were tested in a passive change-detection paradigm with an n-back manipulation to examine memory for the last fixated item (one-back), second-to-last fixated item (two-back), or nonfixated item (change-other). Eye tracking was used to measure overt fixation while participants passively viewed arrays of colored circles. Results for all ages revealed convergent evidence of memory for up to two sequentially fixated objects (i.e., one-back, two-back), with moderate evidence for nonfixated array items (change-other). A permutation analysis examining change preference over time suggested that differences could not be explained by perseverative looking or location biases.

Seeing and looking: Evidence for developmental and stimulus-dependent changes in infant scanning efficiency

Though previous work has examined infant attention across a variety of tasks, less is known about the individual saccades and fixations that make up each bout of attention, and how individual differences in saccade and fixation patterns (i.e., scanning efficiency) change with development, scene content and perceptual load. To address this, infants between the ages of 5 and 11 months were assessed longitudinally (Experiment 1) and cross-sectionally (Experiment 2). Scanning efficiency (fixation duration, saccade rate, saccade amplitude, and saccade velocity) was assessed while infants viewed six quasi-naturalistic scenes that varied in content (social or non-social) and scene complexity (3, 6 or 9 people/objects). Results from Experiment 1 revealed moderate to strong stability of individual differences in saccade rate, mean fixation duration, and saccade amplitude, and both experiments revealed 5-month-old infants to make larger, faster, and more frequent saccades than older infants. Scanning efficiency was assessed as the relation between fixation duration and saccade amplitude, and results revealed 11-month-olds to have high scanning efficiency across all scenes. However, scanning efficiency also varied with scene content, such that all infants showing higher scanning efficiency when viewing social scenes, and more complex scenes. These results suggest both developmental and stimulus-dependent changes in scanning efficiency, and further highlight the use of saccade and fixation metrics as a sensitive indicator of cognitive processing.

Attentional asymmetry in orienting and alertness and its relationship to temperament: A longitudinal study of infants aged 6-24 months

Previous research suggests that difficulties in orienting to visual stimuli directed by the right hemisphere are related to parental reports of distress and may be an early sign of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One possible reason for this difficulty is infants' ability to achieve high levels of alertness, which also depends on the right hemisphere. This study examines the relationship between phasic alertness and asymmetry in visual orienting in typically-developing 6-24-month-old infants using the overlap paradigm. Participants were given a spatially non-directive warning signal shortly before the onset of the peripheral target. The signal reduced latencies in both overlap and no-overlap conditions. No main effects of age and visual field or interaction were found. However, results confirm the negative association between temperamental soothability and disengagement difficulty toward the left visual field at 6 months. This is discussed from the viewpoint of early left visual field attentional bias in relation to social cognition.

iCatcher: A neural network approach for automated coding of young children's eye movements

Infants' looking behaviors are often used for measuring attention, real-time processing, and learning-often using low-resolution videos. Despite the ubiquity of gaze-related methods in developmental science, current analysis techniques usually involve laborious post hoc coding, imprecise real-time coding, or expensive eye trackers that may increase data loss and require a calibration phase. As an alternative, we propose using computer vision methods to perform automatic gaze estimation from low-resolution videos. At the core of our approach is a neural network that classifies gaze directions in real time. We compared our method, called iCatcher, to manually annotated videos from a prior study in which infants looked at one of two pictures on a screen. We demonstrated that the accuracy of iCatcher approximates that of human annotators and that it replicates the prior study's results. Our method is publicly available as an open-source repository at https://github.com/yoterel/iCatcher.

Visual competition attenuates emotion effects during overt attention shifts

Numerous different objects are simultaneously visible in a person's visual field, competing for attention. This competition has been shown to affect eye-movements and early neural responses toward stimuli, while the role of a stimulus' emotional meaning for mechanisms of overt attention shifts under competition is unclear. The current study combined EEG and eye-tracking to investigate effects of competition and emotional content on overt shifts of attention to human face stimuli. Competition prolonged the latency of the P1 component and of saccades, while faces showing emotional expressions elicited an early posterior negativity (EPN). Remarkably, the emotion-related modulation of the EPN was attenuated when two stimuli were competing for attention compared to non-competition. In contrast, no interaction effects of emotional expression and competition were observed on other event-related potentials. This finding indicates that competition can decelerate attention shifts in general and also diminish the emotion-driven attention capture, measured through the smaller effects of emotional expression on EPN amplitude. Reduction of the brain's responsiveness to emotional content in the presence of distractors contradicts models that postulate fully automatic processing of emotions.

The development of visual attention in early infancy: Insights from a free-viewing paradigm

Theories of visual attention suggest a cascading development of subfunctions such as alertness, spatial orientation, attention to object features, and endogenous control. Here, we aimed to track infants' visual developmental steps from a primarily exogenously to more endogenously controlled processing style during their first months of life. In this repeated measures study, 51 infants participated in seven fortnightly assessments at postterm ages of 4-16 weeks. Infants were presented with the same set of static and dynamic paired comparison stimuli in each assessment. Visual behavior was evaluated by a newly introduced scoring scheme. Our results confirmed the suggested visual developmental hierarchy and clearly demonstrated the suitability of our scoring scheme for documenting developmental changes in visual attention during early infancy. Besides the general ontogenetic course of development, we also discuss intra- and interindividual differences which may affect single assessments, and highlight the importance of repeated measurements for reliable evaluation of developmental changes.

Testing predictions of a neural process model of visual attention in infancy across competitive and non-competitive contexts

A key question in early development is how changes in neural systems give rise to changes in infants' behavior. We examine this question by testing predictions of a dynamic field (DF) model of infant spatial attention. We tested 5‐, 7‐, and 10‐month‐old infants in the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) task containing the original non‐competitive cue conditions (when a central stimulus disappeared before a cue onset) and new competitive cue conditions (when a central stimulus remained visible throughout the trial). This allowed testing of five model predictions: (1) that orienting accuracy would be higher and (2) reaction times would be slower for all competitive conditions; (3) that all infants would be slower to orient in the competitive conditions, though (4) older infants would show the strongest competition costs; and (5) that reaction times would be particularly slow for un‐cued competitive conditions. Four of these five predictions were supported, and the remaining prediction was supported in part. We next examined fits of the model to the expanded task. New simulation results reveal close fits to the present findings after parameter modification. Critically, developmental parameters of the model were not altered, providing support for the DF model's account of neuro‐developmental change.

The development of visual attention in infancy: A cascade approach

Visual attention develops rapidly and significantly during the first postnatal years. At birth, infants have poor visual acuity, poor head and neck control, and as a result have little autonomy over where and how long they look. Across the first year, the neural systems that support alerting, orienting, and endogenous attention develop, allowing infants to more effectively focus their attention on information in the environment important for processing. However, visual attention is a system that develops in the context of the whole child, and fully understanding this development requires understanding how attentional systems interact and how these systems interact with other systems across wide domains. By adopting a cascades framework we can better position the development of visual attention in the context of the whole developing child. Specifically, development builds, with previous achievements setting the stage for current development, and current development having cascading consequences on future development. In addition, development reflects changes in multiple domains, and those domains influence each other across development. Finally, development reflects and produces changes in the input that the visual system receives; understanding the changing input is key to fully understand the development of visual attention. The development of visual attention is described in this context.

Infant precursors of executive function in Down syndrome

BACKGROUND

Although early features of infant cognition are predictive of executive function (EF) in typically developing (TD) children, there is little information regarding the developmental origins of EF in neurogenetic conditions, such as Down syndrome (DS).

METHODS

The current study compared the performance of infants with and without DS on three dimensions that are hypothesised EF precursors: visual engagement, attention shifting and action planning. Additionally, the relationship between these EF precursors at Time 1 and EF performance at Time 2 (6 months later) was examined in the DS group. Participants were 36 infants with DS, M chronological age = 12.65 months, SD = 2.11; M developmental age = 8.84 months, SD = 2.22, and 36 TD infants, M chronological age = 8.62, SD = 3.06; M developmental age = 8.64 months, SD = 3.40.

RESULTS

Infants with DS visually engaged with objects for longer durations and demonstrated challenges with action planning compared with TD infants at Time 1. Attention shifting at Time 1 significantly predicted EF performance at Time 2 in the DS group.

CONCLUSIONS

This study provides evidence that an early atypical presentation of EF precursors is detectable during infancy in DS and is predictive of subsequent EF performance. These findings contribute to the identification of areas of early cognitive risk in DS and can inform future interventions in this population.

Emotional content influences eye-movements under natural but not under instructed conditions

ABSTRACTIn everyday life, people can freely decide if and where they would like to move their attention and gaze, often influenced by physical and emotional salience of stimuli. However, many laboratory paradigms explicitly instruct participants when and how to move their eyes, leading to unnatural instructed eye-movements. The current preregistered study compared eye-movements to peripherally appearing faces with happy, angry and neutral expressions under natural and instructed conditions. Participants reliably moved their eyes towards peripheral faces, even when they were not instructed to do so; however, eye-movements were significantly slower under natural than under instructed conditions. Competing central stimuli decelerated eye-movements independently of instructions. Unexpectedly, the emotional salience only affected eye-movements under natural conditions, with faster saccades towards emotional than towards neutral faces. No effects of emotional expression occurred when participants were instructed to move their eyes. The study shows that natural eye-movements significantly differ from instructed eye-movements and emotion-driven attention effects are reduced when participants are artificially instructed to move their eyes, suggesting that research should investigate eye-movements under natural conditions.

Head and eyes: Looking behavior in 12- to 24-month-old infants

This study demonstrates evidence for a foundational process underlying active vision in older infants during object play. Using head-mounted eye-tracking and motion capture, looks to an object are shown to be tightly linked to and synchronous with a stilled head, regardless of the duration of gaze, for infants 12 to 24 months of age. Despite being a developmental period of rapid and marked changes in motor abilities, the dynamic coordination of head stabilization and sustained gaze to a visual target is developmentally invariant during the examined age range. The findings indicate that looking with an aligned head and eyes is a fundamental property of human vision and highlights the importance of studying looking behavior in freely moving perceivers in everyday contexts, opening new questions about the role of body movement in both typical and atypical development of visual attention.

Competing Perceptual Salience in a Visual Word Recognition Task Differentially Affects Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Differences in visual attention have long been recognized as a central characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Regardless of social content, children with ASD show a strong preference for perceptual salience-how interesting (i.e., striking) certain stimuli are, based on their visual properties (e.g., color, geometric patterning). However, we do not know the extent to which attentional allocation preferences for perceptual salience persist when they compete with top-down, linguistic information. This study examined the impact of competing perceptual salience on visual word recognition in 17 children with ASD (mean age 31 months) and 17 children with typical development (mean age 20 months) matched on receptive language skills. A word recognition task presented two images on a screen, one of which was named (e.g., Find the bowl!). On Neutral trials, both images had high salience (i.e., were colorful and had geometric patterning). On Competing trials, the distracter image had high salience but the target image had low salience, creating competition between bottom-up (i.e., salience-driven) and top-down (i.e., language-driven) processes. Though both groups of children showed word recognition in an absolute sense, competing perceptual salience significantly decreased attention to the target only in the children with ASD. These findings indicate that perceptual properties of objects can disrupt attention to relevant information in children with ASD, which has implications for supporting their language development. Findings also demonstrate that perceptual salience affects attentional allocation preferences in children with ASD, even in the absence of social stimuli. LAY SUMMARY: This study found that visually striking objects distract young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from looking at relevant (but less striking) objects named by an adult. Language-matched, younger children with typical development were not significantly affected by this visual distraction. Though visual distraction could have cascading negative effects on language development in children with ASD, learning opportunities that build on children's focus of attention are likely to support positive outcomes.

Visual Neuropsychology in Development: Anatomo-Functional Brain Mechanisms of Action/Perception Binding in Health and Disease

Vision is the main entrance for environmental input to the human brain. Even if vision is our most used sensory modality, its importance is not limited to environmental exploration. Rather it has strong links to motor competences, further extending to cognitive and social aspects of human life. These multifaceted relationships are particularly important in developmental age and become dramatically evident in presence of complex deficits originating from visual aberrancies. The present review summarizes the available neuropsychological evidence on the development of visual competences, with a particular focus on the associated visuo-motor integration skills in health and disease. With the aim of supporting future research and interventional settings, the goal of the present review is to constitute a solid base to help the translation of neuropsychological hypotheses into straightforward empirical investigations and rehabilitation/training protocols. This approach will further increase the impact, ameliorate the acceptance, and ease the use and implementation of lab-derived intervention protocols in real-life situations.

Overt and covert attention shifts to emotional faces: Combining EEG, eye tracking, and a go/no-go paradigm

In everyday life, faces with emotional expressions quickly attract attention and eye movements. To study the neural mechanisms of such emotion-driven attention by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), tasks that employ covert shifts of attention are commonly used, in which participants need to inhibit natural eye movements towards stimuli. It remains, however, unclear how shifts of attention to emotional faces with and without eye movements differ from each other. The current preregistered study aimed to investigate neural differences between covert and overt emotion-driven attention. We combined eye tracking with measurements of ERPs to compare shifts of attention to faces with happy, angry, or neutral expressions when eye movements were either executed (go conditions) or withheld (no-go conditions). Happy and angry faces led to larger EPN amplitudes, shorter latencies of the P1 component, and faster saccades, suggesting that emotional expressions significantly affected shifts of attention. Several ERPs (N170, EPN, LPC) were augmented in amplitude when attention was shifted with an eye movement, indicating an enhanced neural processing of faces if eye movements had to be executed together with a reallocation of attention. However, the modulation of ERPs by facial expressions did not differ between the go and no-go conditions, suggesting that emotional content enhances both covert and overt shifts of attention. In summary, our results indicate that overt and covert attention shifts differ but are comparably affected by emotional content.

Reduced engagement of visual attention in children with autism spectrum disorder

LAY ABSTRACT

Limited eye contact and difficulty tracking where others are looking are common in people with autism spectrum disorder. It is unclear, however, whether these are specifically social differences; it is possible that they are a result of broader alterations in engaging and disengaging visual attention. We used eye-tracking technology with children with autism spectrum disorder (n = 35) and typical development (n = 32), showing them both social and nonsocial imaging to test their visual attention. Children with autism spectrum disorder had a significant difference in how long it took them to look from an image in the middle to one on the side, depending on whether the middle image stayed on the screen or flashed off before the one on the side appeared. This difference was present for both social and nonsocial images, and was related to cognitive ability for only the children with autism spectrum disorder. Our findings suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder have differences in general processes of engaging visual attention that are not specifically social in nature, and that these processes may relate to cognitive ability in autism spectrum disorder. Affected processes of visual engagement in autism spectrum disorder may contribute to symptoms like reduced eye contact, but social-specific symptoms of autism spectrum disorder likely do not stem from reduced visual engagement alone.

Visual disengagement in young infants in relation to age, sex, SES, developmental level and adaptive functioning

Visual attention plays a key role in infants' interaction with the environment, and shapes their behavioral and brain development. As such, early problems with flexibly switching gaze from one stimulus to another (visual disengagement) have been hypothesized to lead to developmental difficulties (e.g. joint attention and social skills) over time. This study aimed to identify cross-sectional associations between performance in the Gap task (gaze shift latencies and visual attention disengagement) and measures of development and adaptive behavior in conjunction to any sex or socioeconomic status effects in infancy. We measured visual attention disengagement in 436 5-month-old infants and calculated its association with cognitive developmental level, adaptive behaviours, socioeconomic status (SES) and biological sex. In the Gap task, participants must redirect their gaze from a central stimulus to an appearing peripheral stimulus. The three experimental conditions of the task (Gap, Baseline and Overlap) differ on the timepoint when the central stimuli disappears in relation to the appearance of the peripheral stimulus: 200 ms before the peripheral stimulus appears (Gap), simultaneously to its appearance (Baseline), or with peripheral stimulus offset (Overlap). The data from the experimental conditions showed the expected pattern, with average latencies being the shortest in the Gap and longest in the Overlap condition. Females were faster (p = .004) than males in the Gap condition, which could indicate that arousal-related effects differ as a function of biological sex. Infants from higher SES were slower (p = .031) in the Overlap condition compared to lower SES infants. This suggests that basic visual attention may differ by socio-cultural background, and should be considered when studying visual attention and its developmental correlates. We observed no significant association to concurrent developmental level or adaptive function. Given its large sample size, this study provides a useful reference for future studies of visual disengagement in early infancy.

An Integrated Perspective on Spatio-Temporal Attention and Infant Language Acquisition

Efficiency in the early ability to switch attention toward competing visual stimuli (spatial attention) may be linked to future ability to detect rapid acoustic changes in linguistic stimuli (temporal attention). To test this hypothesis, we compared individual performances in the same cohort of Italian-learning infants in two separate tasks: (i) an overlap task, measuring disengagement efficiency for visual stimuli at 4 months (Experiment 1), and (ii) an auditory discrimination task for trochaic syllabic sequences at 7 months (Experiment 2). Our results indicate that an infant's efficiency in processing competing information in the visual field (i.e., visuospatial attention; Exp. 1) correlates with the subsequent ability to orient temporal attention toward relevant acoustic changes in the speech signal (i.e., temporal attention; Exp. 2). These results point out the involvement of domain-general attentional processes (not specific to language or the sensorial domain) playing a pivotal role in the development of early language skills in infancy.

Pupillary and Attentional Responses to Infant Facial Expressions in Mothers Across Socioeconomic Variations

Maternal responses to infant facial expressions were examined in two socioeconomically diverse samples of South African mothers (Study I, N = 111; and Study II, N = 214; age: 17-44 years) using pupil and gaze tracking. Study I showed increased pupil response to infant distress expressions in groups recruited from private as compared to public maternity clinics, possibly reflecting underlying differences in socioeconomic status (SES) across the groups. Study II, sampling uniformly low-SES neighborhoods, found increased pupil dilation and faster orientation to expressions of infant distress, but only in the highest income group. These results are consistent with maternal physiological and attentional sensitivity to infant distress cues but challenge the universality of this sensitivity across socioeconomic diversity.

Associations Between Neonatal Cry Acoustics and Visual Attention During the First Year

It has been suggested that early cry parameters are connected to later cognitive abilities. The present study is the first to investigate whether the acoustic features of infant cry are associated with cognitive development already during the first year, as measured by oculomotor orienting and attention disengagement. Cry sounds for acoustic analyses (fundamental frequency; F0) were recorded in two neonatal cohorts at the age of 0–8 days (Tampere, Finland) or at 6 weeks (Cape Town, South Africa). Eye tracking was used to measure oculomotor orienting to peripheral visual stimuli and attention disengagement from central stimuli at 8 months (Tampere) or at 6 months (Cape Town) of age. Only a marginal positive correlation between fundamental frequency of cry (F0) and visual attention disengagement was observed in the Tampere cohort, but not in the Cape Town cohort. This correlation indicated that infants from the Tampere cohort with a higher neonatal F0 were marginally slower to shift their gaze away from the central stimulus to the peripheral stimulus. No associations between F0 and oculomotor orienting were observed in either cohort. We discuss possible factors influencing the current pattern of results suggesting a lack of replicable associations between neonatal cry and visual attention and suggest directions for future research investigating the potential of early cry analysis in predicting later cognitive development.

Evidence for Attentional Phenotypes in Infancy and Their Role in Visual Cognitive Performance

Infant visual attention rapidly develops during the first year of life, playing a pivotal role in the way infants process, learn, and respond to their visual world. It is possible that individual differences in eye movement patterns shape early experience and thus subsequent cognitive development. If this is the case, then it may be possible to identify sub-optimal attentional behaviors in infancy, before the emergence of cognitive deficit. In Experiment 1, a latent profile analysis was conducted on scores derived from the Infant Orienting with Attention (IOWA) task, a cued-attention task that measures individual differences in spatial attention and orienting proficiency. This analysis identified three profiles that varied substantially in terms of attentional efficiency. The largest of these profiles (“high flexible”, 55%) demonstrated functionally optimal patterns of attentional functioning with relatively rapid, selective, and adaptive orienting responses. The next largest group (“low reactive”, 39.6%) demonstrated low attentional sensitivity with slow, insensitive orienting responses. The smallest group (“high reactive”, 5.4%) demonstrated attentional over-sensitivity, with rapid, unselective and inaccurate orienting responses. A linear mixed effect model and growth curve analysis conducted on 5- to 11-month-old eye tracking data revealed significant stable differences in growth trajectory for each phenotype group. Results from Experiment 2 demonstrated the ability of attentional phenotypes to explain individual differences in general cognitive functioning, revealing significant between-phenotype group differences in performance on a visual short-term memory task. Taken together, results presented here demonstrate that attentional phenotypes are present early in life and predict unique patterns of growth from 5 to 11 months, and may be useful in understanding the origin of individual differences in general visuo-cognitive functioning.

Differential Associations of Apolipoprotein E ε4 Genotype With Attentional Abilities Across the Life Span of Individuals With Down Syndrome

IMPORTANCE

Risk of Alzheimer disease (AD) is particularly high for individuals with Down syndrome (DS). The ε4 allele of the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE ε4) is associated with an additional risk for AD. In typical development, there is evidence that the APOE ε4 genotype is associated with an early cognitive advantage. Here we investigate associations of APOE ε4 with attention across the life span of individuals with DS.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate associations between APOE ε4 and attentional abilities in young children and in adults with DS.

DESIGN, SETTINGS, AND PARTICIPANTS

In this cross-sectional study, data were collected from 80 young children with DS (8-62 months of age) and 240 adults with DS (16-71 years of age) during the period from 2013 to 2018 at a research center to examine the association between APOE status (ε4 carrier vs ε4 noncarrier) and attentional abilities.

EXPOSURE

APOE status (ε4 carrier vs ε4 noncarrier).

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES

For the children, attentional ability was assessed using an eye-tracking paradigm, the gap-overlap task; the size of the gap effect was the primary outcome. For the adults, attentional ability was assessed using the CANTAB simple reaction time task; the standard deviation of response time latencies was the primary outcome. Cross-sectional developmental trajectories were constructed linking attentional ability with age in ε4 carriers and ε4 noncarriers for children and adults separately.

RESULTS

The child sample comprised 23 ε4 carriers and 57 ε4 noncarriers. The adult sample comprised 61 ε4 carriers and 179 ε4 noncarriers. For the children, a significant difference between trajectory intercepts (ηp2 = 0.14) indicated that ε4 carriers (B = 100.24 [95% CI, 18.52-181.96]) exhibited an attentional advantage over ε4 noncarriers (B = 314.78 [95% CI, 252.17-377.39]). There was an interaction between APOE status and age (ηp2 = 0.10); while the gap effect decreased with age for ε4 noncarriers (B = -4.58 [95% CI, -6.67 to -2.48]), reflecting the development of the attention system, there was no change across age in ε4 carriers (B = 0.77 [95% CI, -1.57 to 3.12]). For the adults, there was no main effect of ε4 carrier status, but there was an interaction between APOE status and age (B = 0.02 [95% CI, 0.004-0.07]), so that ε4 carriers had poorer attentional ability than ε4 noncarriers at older ages.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE

APOE ε4 is associated with an attentional advantage early in development and a disadvantage later in life for individuals with DS, similar to the pattern reported in typical development. Understanding the differential role of APOE across the life span is an important step toward future interventions.

Dynamic Advances in Emotion Processing: Differential Attention towards the Critical Features of Dynamic Emotional Expressions in 7-Month-Old Infants

Infants' visual processing of emotion undergoes significant development across the first year of life, yet our knowledge regarding the mechanisms underlying these advances is limited. Additionally, infant emotion processing is commonly examined using static faces, which do not accurately depict real-world emotional displays. The goal of this study was to characterize 7-month-olds' visual scanning strategies when passively viewing dynamic emotional expressions to examine whether infants modify their scanning patterns depending on the emotion. Eye-tracking measures revealed differential attention towards the critical features (eyes, mouth) of expressions. The eyes captured the greatest attention for angry and neutral faces, and the mouth captured the greatest attention for happy faces. A time-course analysis further elucidated at what point during the trial differential scanning patterns emerged. The current results suggest that 7-month-olds are sensitive to the critical features of emotional expressions and scan them differently depending on the emotion. The scanning patterns presented in this study may serve as a link to understanding how infants begin to differentiate between expressions in the context of emotion recognition.

Relation Between Event-Related Potential Latency and Saccade Latency in Overt Shifts of Attention

Controlled shifts of attention between competing stimuli are crucial for effective everyday visual behaviour. While these typically involve overt shifts of fixation, many past studies used covert attention shifts in which fixation is unchanged, meaning that some response components may result from the inhibition of eye movements. In this study, the neural events in the human brain when making overt shifts of attention are studied through the combination of event-related potential recording with simultaneous eye tracking. Fixation shifts under competition (central target remains visible when a peripheral target appears) were compared with noncompetition (central target disappears). A longer latency for competition compared with noncompetition, which is found in the saccadic response, is already present in the early occipital positivity when a single target is presented for the fixation shift. These results indicate that the requirement to disengage from a current target affects the time course of neural processing at an early level. However, the relation is more complex when the participant is required to choose which of two targets to fixate.

Working together to orient faster: The combined effects of alerting and orienting networks on pupillary responses at 8 months of age

Multiple visual attention mechanisms are active already in infancy, most notably one supporting orienting towards stimuli and another, maintaining appropriate levels of alertness, when exploring the environment. They are thought to depend on separate brain networks, but their effects are difficult to isolate in existing behavioural paradigms. Better understanding of the contribution of each network to individual differences in visual orienting may help to explain their role in attention development. Here, we tested whether alerting and spatial cues differentially modulate pupil dilation in 8-month-old infants in a visual orienting paradigm. We found differential effects in the time course of these responses depending on the cue type. Moreover, using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) we identified two main components of pupillary response, which may reflect the alerting and orienting network activity. In a regression analysis, these components together explained nearly 40 % of variance in saccadic latencies in the spatial cueing condition of the task. These results likely demonstrate that both networks work together in 8-month-old infants and that their activity can be indexed with pupil dilation combined with PCA, but not with raw changes in pupil diameter.

Visual short-term memory for overtly attended objects during infancy

We investigated limitations in young infants' visual short-term memory (VSTM). We used a one-shot change detection task to ask whether 4- and 8.5-month-old infants (N = 59) automatically encode fixated items in VSTM. Our task included trials that consisted of the following sequence: first a brief (500 ms) presentation with a sample array of two items, next a brief (300 ms) delay period with a blank screen, and finally a test array (2,000 ms) identical to the sample array except that the color of one of the two items is changed. In Experiment 1, we induced infants to fixate one item by rotating it during the sample (the other item remained stationary). In Experiment 2, none of the items rotated. In both experiments, 4-month-old infants looked equally at the fixated item when it did and did not change color, providing no evidence that they encoded in VSTM the fixated item. In contrast, 8.5-month-old infants in Experiment 1 preferred the fixated item when it changed color from sample to test. Thus, 4-month-old infants do not appear to automatically encode fixated items in VSTM.

Is mere exposure enough? The effects of bilingual environments on infant cognitive development

Bilinguals purportedly outperform monolinguals in non-verbal tasks of cognitive control (the 'bilingual advantage'). The most common explanation is that managing two languages during language production constantly draws upon, and thus strengthens, domain-general inhibitory mechanisms (Green 1998 Biling. Lang. Cogn. 1, 67-81. (doi:10.1017/S1366728998000133)). However, this theory cannot explain why a bilingual advantage has been found in preverbal infants (Kovacs & Mehler 2009 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 6556-6560. (doi:10.1073/pnas.0811323106)). An alternative explanation is needed. We propose that exposure to more varied, less predictable (language) environments drive infants to sample more by placing less weight on consolidating familiar information in order to orient sooner to (and explore) new stimuli. To confirm the bilingual advantage in infants and test our proposal, we administered four gaze-contingent eye-tracking tasks to seven- to nine-month-old infants who were being raised in either bilingual (n = 51) or monolingual (n = 51) homes. We could not replicate the finding by Kovacs and Mehler that bilingual but not monolingual infants inhibit learned behaviour (experiment 1). However, we found that infants exposed to bilingual environments do indeed explore more than those exposed to monolingual environments, by potentially disengaging attention faster from one stimulus in order to shift attention to another (experiment 3) and by switching attention more frequently between stimuli (experiment 4). These data suggest that experience-driven adaptations may indeed result in infants exposed to bilingual environments switching attention more frequently than infants exposed to a monolingual environment.

Visual development

The developing visual brain is an integrated system, linking analysis of the visual input to visuomotor control, visual cognition, and attention. Major points in human visual development are the presence of rudimentary pathways present at birth which can control fixation behavior, with subsequent development of specific functions. These functions include the emergence of cortical selectivity; the integration of local signals to provide global representations of motion, shape, and space; the development of visuomotor modules for eye movements, manual reaching, and locomotion; and the development of distinct attentional systems. Measures of these processes in infancy and early childhood can provide indicators of broader brain development in the at-risk child. A key system in development is the dorsal cortical stream. Measures of global motion processing, visuomotor actions, and attention suggest that this system is particularly vulnerable in children with a wide range of neurodevelopmental disorders. Early disorders of the eye (strabismus, cataract) reveal the level of plasticity in the developing visual system and the ways in which early experience can affect the course of functional development.

Early Development of Visual Attention: Change, Stability, and Longitudinal Associations

Visual attention is a basic mechanism of information gathering and environment selection and consequently plays a fundamental role in influencing developmental trajectories. Here, we highlight evidence for predictive associations from early visual attention to emotion regulation, executive function, language and broader cognitive ability, mathematics and literacy skills, and neurodevelopmental conditions. Development of visual attention is also multifaceted and nonlinear. In daily life, core functions such as orienting, selective filtering, and processing of visual inputs are intertwined and influenced by many other cognitive components. Furthermore, the demands of an attention task vary according to the experience, motivation, and cognitive and physical constraints of participants, while the mechanisms underlying performance may change with development. Thus, markers of attention may need to be interpreted differently across development and between populations. We summarize research that has combined multiple measurements and techniques to further our understanding of visual attention development and highlight possibilities for the future.

Cross-cultural analysis of attention disengagement times supports the dissociation of faces and patterns in the infant brain

Infants are slower to disengage from faces than non-face patterns when distracted by novel competing stimuli. While this perceptual predilection for faces is well documented, its universality and mechanisms in relation to other aspects of attention are poorly understood. We analysed attention disengagement times for faces and non-face patterns in a large sample of 6-to 9-month-old infants (N = 637), pooled from eye tracking studies in socioculturally diverse settings (Finland, Malawi, South Africa). Disengagement times were classified into distinct groups of quick and delayed/censored responses by unsupervised clustering. Delayed disengagement was frequent for faces (52.1% of trials), but almost negligible for patterns (3.9% of trials) in all populations. The magnitude of this attentional bias varied by individuals, whereas the impact of situational factors and facial expression was small. Individual variations in disengagement from faces were moderately stable within testing sessions and independent from variations in disengagement times for patterns. These results point to a fundamental dissociation of face and pattern processing in infants and demonstrate that the bias for faces can be robust against distractors and habituation. The results raise the possibility that attention to faces varies as an independent, early-emerging social trait in populations.

Infants use knowledge of emotions to augment face perception: Evidence of top-down modulation of perception early in life

While top-down modulation is believed to be central to adult perception, the developmental origins of this ability are unclear. Here, we present a direct, behavioral investigation of top-down modulation of perception in infancy using emotional face perception as a test case. We investigated whether 9-month-olds can modulate their face perception based on predictive, auditory emotional cues without any training or familiarization procedure. Infants first heard a 3-second emotional vocal sound (happy/angry) while their gaze was held in the center of the screen. Then, they were presented with a pair of emotional and neutral faces images without any audio sound. The faces were small (4.70° × 5.80°) and presented in randomized locations outside their focus of attention. We measured the initial latency to shift gaze to look at a congruent emotional face as an index of infants' pre-attentive perception of these faces. We found that infants' face perception was augmented by preceding emotional cues: They were faster to look at the emotional face after hearing an emotionally congruent sound than an incongruent one. Moreover, the emotional sounds boosted perception of congruent faces 200 ms after the onset of the faces. These top-down effects were robust for both happy and angry emotions, indicating a flexible and active control of perception based on different top-down cues. A control study further supported the view that the Congruency effect is due to a top-down influence on face perception rather than a rapid matching of cross-modal emotional signals. Together, these findings demonstrate that top-down modulation of perception is already quite sophisticated early in development. Raw data is available on Github (https://github.com/naiqixiao/CuedEmotion.git).

Impaired Attention Orienting in Young Children With Fragile X Syndrome

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a genetic disorder caused by a trinucleotide CGG expansion within the FMR1 gene located on the X chromosome. Children with FXS have been shown to be impaired in dynamic visual attention processing. A key component of dynamic processing is orienting—a perceptual ability that requires disengagement and engagement of attention from one stimulus to fixate on a second. Orienting, specifically the disengagement and engagement of attention, has previously not been studied in young children with FXS. Using an eye tracking gap-overlap task, the present study investigated visual disengagement and engagement in young children with FXS, compared to mental age (MA)- and chronological age (CA)-matched typically developing children. On gap trials, the central stimulus elicited fixation, but then disappeared before the peripheral target appeared, imposing a visual gap between stimuli. On overlap trials, the central stimulus elicited fixation, and remained present when the peripheral target appeared, creating visual competition. A gap effect emerges when latencies to shift to the peripheral target are longer in overlap versus gap conditions, reflecting the recruitment of cortical and subcortical disengagement and engagement mechanisms. The gap effect was measured as the latency to orient attention to the peripheral target during gap versus overlap conditions. Both MA and CA groups showed the expected gap effect, where children were slower to orient to peripheral targets on overlap trials than on gap trials. In contrast, in the FXS group, saccadic latencies between gap and overlap trials were not significantly different, indicating no significant gap effect. These findings suggest disrupted attentional engagement patterns in FXS that may be underlying impairments in attention orienting, and suggest potential targets for attention training in this population.

The Relation Between Early Parent Verb Input and Later Expressive Verb Vocabulary in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Purpose The purpose of this study was to evaluate if higher quantity, diversity, and grammatical informativeness of verb phrases in parent follow-in utterances (i.e., utterances that mapped onto child attentional leads) were significantly related to later expressive verb vocabulary in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method We examined these associations in a sample of 31 toddlers with ASD and their parents in a longitudinal correlational study. Key aspects of parents' verb input were measured in 2 video-recorded 15-min parent-child free-play sessions. Child expressive verb vocabulary was measured using parent report. Results An aggregate variable composed of the quantity, diversity, and grammatical informativeness of parent verb input in follow-in utterances across the 2 parent-child sessions strongly and positively predicted later child expressive verb vocabulary, total R ² = .25, even when early child expressive verb vocabulary was controlled, R ² change = .17. Parent follow-in utterances without verbs were not significantly related to later child expressive verb vocabulary, R ² = .001. Conclusions These correlational findings are initial steps toward developing a knowledge base for how strong verb vocabulary skills might be facilitated in children with ASD.

Computer vision analysis captures atypical attention in toddlers with autism

To demonstrate the capability of computer vision analysis to detect atypical orienting and attention behaviors in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder. One hundered and four toddlers of 16-31 months old (mean = 22) participated in this study. Twenty-two of the toddlers had autism spectrum disorder and 82 had typical development or developmental delay. Toddlers watched video stimuli on a tablet while the built-in camera recorded their head movement. Computer vision analysis measured participants' attention and orienting in response to name calls. Reliability of the computer vision analysis algorithm was tested against a human rater. Differences in behavior were analyzed between the autism spectrum disorder group and the comparison group. Reliability between computer vision analysis and human coding for orienting to name was excellent (intra-class coefficient 0.84, 95% confidence interval 0.67-0.91). Only 8% of toddlers with autism spectrum disorder oriented to name calling on >1 trial, compared to 63% of toddlers in the comparison group (p = 0.002). Mean latency to orient was significantly longer for toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (2.02 vs 1.06 s, p = 0.04). Sensitivity for autism spectrum disorder of atypical orienting was 96% and specificity was 38%. Older toddlers with autism spectrum disorder showed less attention to the videos overall (p = 0.03). Automated coding offers a reliable, quantitative method for detecting atypical social orienting and reduced sustained attention in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

Early development of attentional disengagement and phasic alertness

Attention development is a critical foundation for cognitive abilities. This study examines the relationship between phasic aspects of alertness and disengagement in infants, using the overlap paradigm. Research shows that visual disengagement in overlap condition is modulated by auditory cues in 6-year-olds. Our participants were aged 6 months (N = 20), 12 months (N = 27), and 24 months (N = 14). Phasic alertness during overlap and no-overlap tasks was manipulated using a spatially nondirective warning signal shortly before onset of the peripheral target. Responses in overlap condition were slower and fewer than in no-overlap condition. The signal showed a tendency to reduce latencies in both overlap and no-overlap conditions. While our hypothesis that the warning signal might be more effective in younger infants was not supported, we confirmed the association reported in previous studies between temperamental soothability and disengagement latencies in infancy.

Correlates of early cognition in infants with Down syndrome

BACKGROUND

While delays in cognitive development are detectable during early development in Down syndrome, the neuropsychological and biomedical underpinnings of cognitive skill acquisition in this population remain poorly understood.

METHOD

To explore this issue, 38 infants with Down syndrome [mean chronological age = 9.65 months; SD = 3.64] completed the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-III and a set of laboratory tasks that measured sustained attention (duration of visual attention during a 1-min object exploration task), attention shifting (mean latency to shift attention on an alternating object presentation task) and visual short-term memory (dishabituation to a novel object on a change preference task).

RESULTS

Latency to shift attention was negatively associated with Bayley Cognitive Scale raw scores, even when controlling for the effects of chronological age, r (33) = -.41, P = .02. In addition, prematurity status was associated with latency to shift attention.

CONCLUSIONS

Early attention shifting may be an important factor that facilitates overall cognitive skill acquisition in infants with Down syndrome, and premature birth may be a risk factor for difficulties on this dimension.

Visual short-term memory guides infants' visual attention

Adults' visual attention is guided by the contents of visual short-term memory (VSTM). Here we asked whether 10-month-old infants' (N = 41) visual attention is also guided by the information stored in VSTM. In two experiments, we modified the one-shot change detection task (Oakes, Baumgartner, Barrett, Messenger, & Luck, 2013) to create a simplified cued visual search task to ask how information stored in VSTM influences where infants look. A single sample item (e.g., a colored circle) was presented at fixation for 500 ms, followed by a brief (300 ms) retention interval and then a test array consisting of two items, one on each side of fixation. One item in the test array matched the sample stimulus and the other did not. Infants were more likely to look at the non-matching item than at the matching item, demonstrating that the information stored rapidly in VSTM guided subsequent looking behavior.

The development of object-based attention in infants

We examined whether infants aged 6-8 months show object-based attention using the preferential looking method. In object-based attention, which is a prerequisite function for efficient real-world processing of various stimuli, a target that appears at a cued object is detected and processed faster than a target appearing at an uncued object. We presented 6- to 8-month-old infants with the visual stimuli consisting of two white vertical rectangles side by side, in which a target appearing at 1) the cued location, 2) the end opposite to the cued location, and 3) another rectangle's end following the cue, using an established paradigm, and measured each infant's first saccade to the target. We found that (1) infants of all ages could make the first saccade to the target appearing at the cued location, (2) only 8-month-old infants made the first saccade to the target appearing at the opposite end to the cued location more accurately than to the target appearing at the other rectangle's end. These results indicate that object-based attention might be acquired around 8 months compared with the spatial cueing effect that appears at around 6 months. Our findings suggest that the objects play a role in visual attention in 8-month-old infants.