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）：最近的工作表征了婴儿期视觉短期记忆（VSTM）的各个方面，在第一年后发现了戏剧性的快速发展变化。但是，在现实的认知任务中，VSTM不用于隔离 - 它用于计划眼动，所参与的信息是在VSTM中编码的，并且将VSTM中存储的信息与当前可用的信息进行了比较。尽管这种相互作用在成年人中已经建立了很好的建立，但目前我们对婴儿期这种相互作用一无所知。此外，在认知发展领域的认识越来越多，只能孤立地理解能力的发展并不能完全理解这种能力的发展。随着技能和能力的发展，它们可能会创造机会练习，脚手架和创造使用其他新兴技能的机会，既可以增强婴儿对新兴技能的使用以及促进该技能的进一步发展。因此，我们了解VSTM早期发展的重要一步是检查如何使用VSTM，并与其他认知能力和能力共同开发。由于几个原因，注意力与VSTM之间的关系尤其重要。首先，成年人发现了VSTM和注意力之间的强大和双向关系。在成年人中，参与的信息是在VSTM中编码的，在VSTM中编码的信息可以引导视觉搜索，计划眼动，并在记忆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和急剧的发展变化，正是其他工作显示出注意力控制的大大变化。因此，两种认知技能沿着相似的时间尺度发展。第三，注意力和VSTM由相同的基础大脑区域提供。因此，随着这些地区的发展，我们希望这两种能力都会发生发展变化。最后，注意策略可能会帮助婴儿在每时每刻都遇到的大量信息，从而促进他们在混乱的视觉场景中对VSTM的使用。与成年人的工作表明，注意策略的个体差异与VSTM能力的个体差异有关。而且，与婴儿一起工作建议他们可以使用一个显着的提示来帮助将注意力集中在场景中的一项上。拟议的工作将基于以前的工作基础，以孤立地研究VSTM和注意力。重点将放在6到10个月之间的过渡上，即VSTM和注意力过程都经历了快速而显着的变化。为了研究VSTM控制注意力的内容，该项目将使用眼睛跟踪方法来研究VSTM在眼动和视觉搜索中的作用（实验1和2）。为了检查注意力提示如何促进VSTM编码，该项目将使用优先的外观和眼神跟踪方法来检查婴儿在这种情况下混乱的视觉场景中的变化检测，即多个项目的阵列（实验3和4）。最后，为了检查这些能力的共同开发，该项目将评估纵向VSTM和注意力能力（实验5）。这些实验将大大增加我们对这种关键认知能力的典型发展的理解。