Attentional blink in infants under 7 months.

ABSTRACT

Attentional blink manifests in infants at 7 months of age, indicating that the working memory capacity of 7-month-olds is comparable to that of adults. However, attentional blink in infants under 7 months is not well understood. In this study, we conducted two experiments to investigate attentional blink in 5- and 6-month-old infants. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that attentional blinks were not observed with either a short lag (200 ms) or a long lag (800 ms). This suggests that 5- and 6-month-olds are unable to consolidate both targets regardless of the temporal distance between the two. We then split the infants into two groups by their age and conducted Experiment 2 with infants aged younger and older than 180 days to compare their consolidating ability to observe whether they could recognize a single item at 100-ms speed by presenting the same visual stream that was used in Experiment 1 except that one target was eliminated. The results showed that infants over 180 days of age could identify a single target in the visual stream at 100-ms presentation speed, whereas infants under 180 days could not. The findings of the current study indicate that the limitation of working memory capacity in infants under 7 months of age is a possible reason for the lack of attentional blink.