Understanding cognitive development in infancy: Attention and visual short-term m

了解婴儿期的认知发展：注意力和视觉短期m

• 批准号: 8387743
• 负责人: LISA M OAKES
• 金额: $ 28.64万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-12-01 至 2016-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8387743
• 关键词: Adult; Age-Months; Architecture; Attention; Behavioral; Binding; Blinking; Brain region; Child; Cognitive; Complex; Cues; Detection; Development; Disease; Event; Eye; Eye Movements; Facial Expression; Felis catus; Foundations; Fragile X Syndrome; Furniture; Future; Image; Individual; Individual Differences; Infant; Knowledge; Lead; Learning; Measures; Methods; Nature; Neurodevelopmental Disorder; Outcome; Parietal; Persons; Population; Process; Research; Risk; Role; Schizophrenia; Services; Short-Term Memory; Side; Social Interaction; Stimulus; Structure; Testing; Time; Visual; Visual attention; Williams Syndrome; Work; autism spectrum disorder; cognitive system; directed attention; distraction; infancy; memory encoding; postnatal; relating to nervous system; research study; scaffold; skills; vision development; visual process; visual processing; visual search

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent work has characterized aspects of visual short-term memory (VSTM) in infancy, uncovering dramatic, rapid developmental change in the first postnatal year. In real-world cognitive tasks, however, VSTM is not used in isolation-it is used to plan eye-movements, information that is attended is encoded in VSTM, and information stored in VSTM is compared with currently available information. Although such interactions are well established in adults, at present we know little about such interactions in infancy. Moreover, there is an increasing realization in the field of cognitive development that solely understanding the development of abilities in isolation does not provide a complete understanding of how such abilities develop. As skills and abilities develop, they likely create opportunities to practice, scaffold, and creating opportunities to use other emerging skills, both enhancing infants' use of the emerging skill and promoting additional development of that skill. Therefore, an important step in our understanding of the early development of VSTM is to examine how VSTM is used and co-develops with other cognitive skills and abilities. The relation between attention and VSTM is particularly important for several reasons. First, powerful and bi-directional relations between VSTM and attention have been uncovered in adults. In adults, information that is attended is encoded in VSTM, and information encoded in VSTM can direct attention in visual search, planning eye-movements, and making comparisons between remembered and now visible scenes. Second, VSTM undergoes rapid and dramatic developmental change between 6 and 8 months, precisely when other work has shown large changes in attentional control. Thus, the two cognitive skills develop along similar timescales. Third, attention and VSTM are subserved by the same underlying brain regions. Thus, as these regions develop, we would expect developmental changes in both these abilities. Finally, attentional strategies may help infants overcome the overwhelming amount of information that they encounter in each moment, facilitating their use of VSTM in cluttered visual scenes. Work with adults has shown that individual differences in attentional strategies are related to individual differences in VSTM capacity. And, work with infants suggests that they can use a salient cue to help focus attention on only one item in a scene. The proposed work will build on the rich foundation of previous work examining VSTM and attention in isolation. The focus will be on the transition between 6 and 10 months, a time when both VSTM and attentional processes undergo rapid and significant change. To examine how the contents of VSTM control attention, this project will use eye-tracking methods to investigate the role of VSTM in eye-movements and visual search (Experiments 1 and 2). To examine how attentional cueing contributes to VSTM encoding, this project will use both preferential looking and eye-tracking methods to examine infants' change detection in cluttered visual scenes-in this case, arrays of multiple items (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, to examine the co-development of these abilities, this project will assess longitudinally VSTM and attentional abilities (Experiment 5). Together, these experiments will add considerably to our understanding of the typical development of this critical cognitive ability.

描述（由申请人提供）：最近的工作描述了婴儿期视觉短期记忆（VSTM）的各个方面，揭示了出生后第一年的戏剧性、快速的发育变化。然而，在现实世界的认知任务中，VSTM 并不是孤立使用的，它用于规划眼球运动，所关注的信息在 VSTM 中进行编码，并将存储在 VSTM 中的信息与当前可用的信息进行比较。尽管这种相互作用在成年人中已经很成熟，但目前我们对婴儿期的这种相互作用知之甚少。此外，在认知发展领域，人们越来越认识到，仅仅孤立地理解能力的发展并不能完全理解这种能力是如何发展的。随着技能和能力的发展，它们可能会创造练习、支架和使用其他新兴技能的机会，既增强婴儿对新兴技能的使用，又促进该技能的进一步发展。因此，我们了解 VSTM 早期发展的一个重要步骤是研究 VSTM 是如何使用并与其他认知技能和能力共同发展的。出于多种原因，注意力和 VSTM 之间的关系尤为重要。首先，在成年人中已经发现了 VSTM 和注意力之间强大的双向关系。在成年人中，所关注的信息被编码在 VSTM 中，而 VSTM 中编码的信息可以在视觉搜索中引导注意力、规划眼球运动以及在记忆的场景和现在可见的场景之间进行比较。其次，VSTM 在 6 到 8 个月之间经历了快速而戏剧性的发展变化，而此时其他研究已经显示出注意力控制方面的巨大变化。因此，这两种认知技能的发展时间相似。第三，注意力和 VSTM 受到相同的潜在大脑区域的促进。因此，随着这些区域的发展，我们预计这两种能力都会发生发展变化。最后，注意力策略可以帮助婴儿克服他们每时每刻遇到的大量信息，促进他们在混乱的视觉场景中使用 VSTM。对成年人的研究表明，注意力策略的个体差异与 VSTM 能力的个体差异有关。而且，对婴儿的研究表明，他们可以使用显着的提示来帮助将注意力集中在场景中的一个项目上。拟议的工作将建立在之前单独检查 VSTM 和注意力的工作的丰富基础上。重点将放在 6 到 10 个月之间的过渡，此时 VSTM 和注意力过程都会发生快速而重大的变化。为了研究 VSTM 的内容如何控制注意力，本项目将使用眼动追踪方法来研究 VSTM 在眼球运动和视觉搜索中的作用（实验 1 和 2）。为了研究注意力提示如何促进 VSTM 编码，该项目将使用优先注视和眼球追踪方法来检查婴儿在杂乱的视觉场景中的变化检测——在本例中是多个项目的数组（实验 3 和 4）。最后，为了检验这些能力的共同发展，该项目将纵向评估 VSTM 和注意力能力（实验 5）。总之，这些实验将大大加深我们对这种关键认知能力典型发展的理解。