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Infants' Selective Attention to Reliable Visual Cues in the Presence of Salient Distractors
Author(s) -
Tummeltshammer Kristen Swan,
Mareschal Denis,
Kirkham Natasha Z.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/cdev.12239
Subject(s) - psychology , salience (neuroscience) , cognitive psychology , salient , stimulus (psychology) , visual attention , visual search , eye tracking , sensory cue , selective attention , developmental psychology , visual perception , eye movement , cognition , perception , neuroscience , physics , artificial intelligence , computer science , optics
With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6‐ and 8‐month‐olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue–reward relation. While 8‐month‐olds showed evidence of increasingly selective attention toward the predictive cues, even when the distractors were highly salient, 6‐month‐olds shifted attention toward the predictive cues only when the distractors were equally (not more) engaging. These experiments suggest that attention in infancy is highly dependent on the relative weightings of predictiveness and visual salience, which may differ across development and context.