Association between Hyperemesis Gravidarum in pregnancy on postnatal ability of infants to attend to a play task with their mother.

Research indicates a higher prevalence of attention deficits in children exposed to HG in utero compared to controls with some claiming that the deficit is due to prenatal effects of malnutrition in HG mothers and others that it is due to maternal mental health after birth. The current study examines the effect of hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) diagnosis during pregnancy on infant attention controlling for maternal stress, depression anxiety and attachment. Thirty-eight infants mean age 4 months were videotaped with their mothers (19 mothers with a hyperemesis diagnosis and 19 controls) during play with a soft toy and looking at a picture book. Infant attention was operationalized as gaze direction towards the play activity, mother, and 'distracted' (indicated by looking away from play or mother). Mothers completed stress, depression, anxiety, and attachment questionnaires. HG exposed infants attended for significantly less time during play with a book or soft toy compared to controls. Maternal stress, depression, anxiety, and attachment did not differ in HG mothers and controls. Infant ability to attend to the toy, book, mother or being distracted did not relate to maternal postnatal attachment, or mental health. These results suggest that the prenatal environment, especially exposure to HG might be associated with reduced infant attention abilities independent of maternal postnatal health.

Neurophysiology of sustained attention in early infancy: Investigating longitudinal relations with recognition memory outcomes.

The ability to sustain attention is a critical cognitive domain that emerges in infancy and is predictive of a multitude of cognitive processes. Here, we used a heart rate (HR) defined measure of sustained attention to assess corresponding changes in frontal electroencephalography (EEG) power at 3 months of age. Second, we examined how the neural underpinnings of HR-defined sustained attention were associated with sustained attention engagement. Third, we evaluated if neural or behavioral sustained attention measures at 3-months predicted subsequent recognition memory scores at 9 months of age. Seventy-five infants were included at 3 months of age and provided usable attention and EEG data and 25 infants returned to the lab at 9 months and provided usable recognition memory data. The current study focuses on oscillatory power in the theta (4-6 Hz) frequency band during phases of HR-defined sustained attention and inattention phases. Results revealed that theta power was significantly higher during phases of sustained attention. Second, higher theta power during sustained attention was positively associated with proportion of time in sustained attention. Third, longitudinal analyses indicated a significant positive association between theta power during sustained attention on 9-month visual paired comparison scores such that higher theta power predicted higher visual paired comparison scores at 9-months. These results highlight the interrelation of the attention and arousal systems which have longitudinal implications for subsequent recognition memory processes.

Shared Multimodal Input Through Social Coordination: Infants With Monolingual and Bilingual Learning Experiences.

A growing number of children in the United States are exposed to multiple languages at home from birth. However, relatively little is known about the early process of word learning-how words are mapped to the referent in their child-centered learning experiences. The present study defined parental input operationally as the integrated and multimodal learning experiences as an infant engages with his/her parent in an interactive play session with objects. By using a head-mounted eye tracking device, we recorded visual scenes from the infant's point of view, along with the parent's social input with respect to gaze, labeling, and actions of object handling. Fifty-one infants and toddlers (aged 6-18 months) from an English monolingual or a diverse bilingual household were recruited to observe the early multimodal learning experiences in an object play session. Despite that monolingual parents spoke more and labeled more frequently relative to bilingual parents, infants from both language groups benefit from a comparable amount of socially coordinated experiences where parents name the object while the object is looked at by the infant. Also, a sequential path analysis reveals multiple social coordinated pathways that facilitate infant object looking. Specifically, young children's attention to the referent objects is directly influenced by parent's object handling. These findings point to the new approach to early language input and how multimodal learning experiences are coordinated socially for young children growing up with monolingual and bilingual learning contexts.

Dialogic Book-Sharing as a Privileged Intersubjective Space.

Parental reading to young children is well-established as being positively associated with child cognitive development, particularly their language development. Research indicates that a particular, "intersubjective," form of using books with children, "Dialogic Book-sharing" (DBS), is especially beneficial to infants and pre-school aged children, particularly when using picture books. The work on DBS to date has paid little attention to the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of the approach. Here, we address the question of what processes taking place during DBS confer benefits to child development, and why these processes are beneficial. In a novel integration of evidence, ranging from non-human primate communication through iconic gestures and pointing, archaeological data on Pre-hominid and early human art, to experimental and naturalistic studies of infant attention, cognitive processing, and language, we argue that DBS entails core characteristics that make it a privileged intersubjective space for the promotion of child cognitive and language development. This analysis, together with the findings of DBS intervention studies, provides a powerful intellectual basis for the wide-scale promotion of DBS, especially in disadvantaged populations.

Moderating effects of environmental stressors on the development of attention to threat in infancy.

An attention bias to threat has been linked to psychosocial outcomes across development, including anxiety (Pérez-Edgar, K., Bar-Haim, Y., McDermott, J. M., Chronis-Tuscano, A., Pine, D. S., & Fox, N. A. (2010). Attention biases to threat and behavioral inhibition in early childhood shape adolescent social withdrawal. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 10(3), 349). Although some attention biases to threat are normative, it remains unclear how these biases diverge into maladaptive patterns of emotion processing for some infants. Here, we examined the relation between household stress, maternal anxiety, and attention bias to threat in a longitudinal sample of infants tested at 4, 8, and 12 months. Infants were presented with a passive viewing eye-tracking task in which angry, happy, or neutral facial configurations appeared in one of the four corners of a screen. We measured infants' latency to fixate each target image and collected measures of parental anxiety and daily hassles at each timepoint. Intensity of daily parenting hassles moderated patterns of attention bias to threat in infants over time. Infants exposed to heightened levels of parental hassles became slower to detect angry (but not happy) facial configurations compared with neutral faces between 4 and 12 months of age, regardless of parental anxiety. Our findings highlight the potential impact of the environment on the development of infants' early threat processing and the need to further investigate how early environmental factors shape the development of infant emotion processing.

The role of infant attention and parental sensitivity in infant cognitive development in the Netherlands and China.

Infant attention and parental sensitivity are important predictors of later child executive function (EF). However, most studies have investigated infant and parent factors in relation to child EF separately and included only mothers from Western samples. The current study examined whether both infant attention at 4 months and parental sensitivity at 4 and 14 months were related to infant EF (i.e., inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) at 14 months among 124 Dutch and 63 Chinese first-time mothers and fathers and their infants. Findings revealed that parental sensitivity at 4 months was not correlated with infant EF abilities at 14 months. However, infant attention at 4 months was significantly related to 14-month working memory, but not to inhibition and cognitive flexibility. Maternal sensitivity at 14 months was significantly related to 14-month inhibition, but not to working memory and cognitive flexibility. No country differences were found in the relation among 4-month infant attention, parental sensitivity, and EF outcomes. Results show that both infant and parent factors are associated with early EF development and that these correlates of early EF skills may be similar in Western and non-Western samples.

Infant Attentional behaviors Are Associated With ADHD Symptomatology and Executive Function in Early Childhood.

Objective: We explored associations between infant attentional behaviors as measured by the First Year Inventory (FYIv2.0) and dimensional ratings of ADHD symptomatology and executive function (EF) in early childhood. Methods: This study included parents (N = 229) who filled out the FYIv2.0 when their children were 12 months of age. When children were approximately 54 months (4.5 years) of age, parents completed reports of children's ADHD symptomatology and EF abilities. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted among measures. Results: We found significant associations among the variables of interest, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, as well as gender differences. Notably, non-social sensory attention (NSA) was significantly related to 54-month ADHD symptom severity. All three 12-month attention variables were significantly related to 54-month EF. Conclusion: Results suggest that infant attentional behaviors predict later ADHD-related behaviors in early childhood. Future research should explore associations using laboratory-based measures and could inform early intervention efforts.

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.

Infant-direct speech and mother-infant attention in depressed and nondepressed mothers / Discurso direcionado à criança e atenção mãe-criança em mães com e sem depressão pós-parto

Postpartum depression (PPD) is associated with disturbances in mother-infant interaction. We compared the content of the infant-directed speech (IDS), the expression of positive affection in the maternal voice and the attentional engagement in dyads of PPD and non-PPD mothers. The participants of this study were 80 mothers and their infants at 3-6 months; 40 mothers presented PPD. The dyads were videotaped during free play interactions. No significant differences were found between the groups in any of these categories. A linear regression analysis indicated that the mother's years of education were a predictive factor for the quality of the interaction only for PPD mothers. PPD influenced mother-infant interaction when associated with maternal sociodemographic characteristics.

A depressão pós-parto (DPP) está associada a distúrbios na interação mãe-bebê. Nós comparamos o conteúdo do discurso direcionado à criança, a expressão de afeto positivo e o engajamento em episódios de atenção em díades de mães com e sem DPP. Participaram deste estudo 80 mães e seus bebês entre 3-6 meses; quarenta mães foram consideradas deprimidas. As díades foram filmadas durante interação livre. Não foram encontradas diferenças significativas entre os grupos em nenhuma dessas categorias. Uma análise de regressão linear indicou que os anos de escolaridade da mãe foram um fator preditivo para a qualidade da interação apenas para as mães com DPP. A DPP influenciou a interação mãe-bebê quando associada a características sociodemográficas maternas.

Intersensory redundancy promotes infant detection of prosody in infant-directed speech.

Prosody, or the intonation contours of speech, conveys emotion and intention to the listener and provides infants with an early basis for detecting meaning in speech. Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by exaggerated prosody, slower tempo, and elongated pauses, all amodal properties detectable across the face and voice. Although speech is an audiovisual event, it has been studied primarily as a unimodal auditory stream without the synchronized dynamic face of the speaker. According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis, redundancy across the senses facilitates perceptual learning of amodal information, including prosody. We predicted that young infants who are still learning to discriminate and categorize prosodic information would detect prosodic changes better in the presence of intersensory redundancy (i.e., synchronous audiovisual speech) than in its absence (i.e., unimodal auditory or asynchronous audiovisual speech). To test this hypothesis, 72 4-month-old infants were habituated to recordings of women reciting passages in IDS with prosody conveying either approval or prohibition and then were tested with recordings of a novel passage with either a change or no change in prosody. Infants who received bimodal synchronous stimulation exhibited significant visual recovery to the novel passage with a change in prosody, but not to a novel passage with no change in prosody. Infants in the unimodal auditory and bimodal asynchronous conditions did not exhibit visual recovery in either condition. Results support the hypothesis that intersensory redundancy facilitates detection and abstraction of invariant prosody across changes in linguistic content and likely serves as an early foundation for the detection of meaning in fluent speech.

Infant Attention and Age 3 Executive Function.

Executive function (EF) abilities refer to higher order cognitive processes necessary to consciously and deliberately persist in a task and are associated with a variety of important developmental outcomes. Attention is believed to support the development and deployment of EF. Although preschool EF and attentional abilities are concurrently linked, much less is known about the longitudinal association between infant attentional abilities and preschool EF. The current study investigated the impact of infant attention orienting behavior on preschool EF. Maternal report and laboratory measures of infant attention were gathered on 114 infants who were 5 months old; performance on four different EF tasks was measured when these same children were 3 years old. Infant attention skills were significantly related to preschool EF, even after controlling for age 3 verbal intelligence. These findings indicate that infant attention may indeed serve as an early marker of later EF. Given the significant developmental outcomes associated with EF, understanding the foundational factors associated with EF is necessary for both theoretical and practical purposes.

Maternal pre- and postnatal anxiety symptoms and infant attention disengagement from emotional faces.

BACKGROUND: Biases in socio-emotional attention may be early markers of risk for self-regulation difficulties and mental illness. We examined the associations between maternal pre- and postnatal anxiety symptoms and infant attention patterns to faces, with particular focus on attentional biases to threat, across male and female infants. METHODS: A general population, Caucasian sample of eight-month old infants (N = 362) were tested using eye-tracking and an attention disengagement (overlap) paradigm, with happy, fearful, neutral, and phase-scrambled faces and distractors. Maternal self-reported anxiety symptoms were assessed with the Symptom Checklist-90/anxiety subscale at five time points between gestational week 14 and 6 months postpartum. RESULTS: Probability of disengagement was lowest for fearful faces in the whole sample. Maternal pre- but not postnatal anxiety symptoms associated with higher threat bias in infants, and the relation between maternal anxiety symptoms in early pregnancy and higher threat bias in infants remained significant after controlling for maternal postnatal symptoms. Maternal postnatal anxiety symptoms, in turn, associated with higher overall probability of disengagement from faces to distractors, but the effects varied by child sex. LIMITATIONS: The small number of mothers suffering from very severe symptoms. No control for the comorbidity of depressive symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Maternal prenatal anxiety symptoms associate with infant's heightened attention bias for threat. Maternal postnatal anxiety symptoms, in turn, associate with infant's overall disengagement probability differently for boys and girls. Boys may show enhanced vigilance for distractors, except when viewing fearful faces, and girls enhanced vigilance for all socio-emotional stimuli. Long-term implications of these findings remain to be explored.

Effects of multimodal synchrony on infant attention and heart rate during events with social and nonsocial stimuli.

Attention is a state of readiness or alertness, associated with behavioral and psychophysiological responses, that facilitates learning and memory. Multisensory and dynamic events have been shown to elicit more attention and produce greater sustained attention in infants than auditory or visual events alone. Such redundant and often temporally synchronous information guides selectivity and facilitates perception, learning, and memory of properties of events specified by redundancy. In addition, events involving faces or other social stimuli provide an extraordinary amount of redundant information that attracts and sustains attention. In the current study, 4- and 8-month-old infants were shown 2-min multimodal videos featuring social or nonsocial stimuli to determine the relative roles of synchrony and stimulus category in inducing attention. Behavioral measures included average looking time and peak look duration, and convergent measurement of heart rate (HR) allowed for the calculation of HR-defined phases of attention: Orienting (OR), sustained attention (SA), and attention termination (AT). The synchronous condition produced an earlier onset of SA (less time in OR) and a deeper state of SA than the asynchronous condition. Social stimuli attracted and held attention (longer duration of peak looks and lower HR than nonsocial stimuli). Effects of synchrony and the social nature of stimuli were additive, suggesting independence of their influence on attention. These findings are the first to demonstrate different HR-defined phases of attention as a function of intersensory redundancy, suggesting greater salience and deeper processing of naturalistic synchronous audiovisual events compared with asynchronous ones.

The Infant Orienting With Attention task: Assessing the neural basis of spatial attention in infancy.

Infant visual attention develops rapidly over the first year of life, significantly altering the way infants respond to peripheral visual events. Here we present data from 5-, 7- and 10-month-old infants using the Infant Orienting With Attention (IOWA) task, designed to capture developmental changes in visual spatial attention and saccade planning. Results indicate rapid development of spatial attention and visual response competition between 5 and 10 months. We use a dynamic neural field (DNF) model to link behavioral findings to neural population activity, providing a possible mechanistic explanation for observed developmental changes. Together, the behavioral and model simulation results provide new insights into the specific mechanisms that underlie spatial cueing effects, visual competition, and visual interference in infancy.

Mothers who are securely attached in pregnancy show more attuned infant mirroring 7 months postpartum.

This study contrasted two forms of mother-infant mirroring: the mother's imitation of the infant's facial, gestural, or vocal behavior (i.e., "direct mirroring") and the mother's ostensive verbalization of the infant's internal state, marked as distinct from the infant's own experience (i.e., "intention mirroring"). Fifty mothers completed the Adult Attachment Interview (Dynamic Maturational Model) during the third trimester of pregnancy. Mothers returned with their infants 7 months postpartum and completed a modified still-face procedure. While direct mirroring did not distinguish between secure and insecure/dismissing mothers, secure mothers were observed to engage in intention mirroring more than twice as frequently as did insecure/dismissing mothers. Infants of the two mother groups also demonstrated differences, with infants of secure mothers directing their attention toward their mothers at a higher frequency than did infants of insecure/dismissing mothers. The findings underscore marked and ostensive verbalization as a distinguishing feature of secure mothers' well-attuned, affect-mirroring communication with their infants.

Ostensive signals support learning from novel attention cues during infancy.

Social attention cues (e.g., head turning, gaze direction) highlight which events young infants should attend to in a busy environment and, recently, have been shown to shape infants' likelihood of learning about objects and events. Although studies have documented which social cues guide attention and learning during early infancy, few have investigated how infants learn to learn from attention cues. Ostensive signals, such as a face addressing the infant, often precede social attention cues. Therefore, it is possible that infants can use ostensive signals to learn from other novel attention cues. In this training study, 8-month-olds were cued to the location of an event by a novel non-social attention cue (i.e., flashing square) that was preceded by an ostensive signal (i.e., a face addressing the infant). At test, infants predicted the appearance of specific multimodal events cued by the flashing squares, which were previously shown to guide attention to but not inform specific predictions about the multimodal events (Wu and Kirkham, 2010). Importantly, during the generalization phase, the attention cue continued to guide learning of these events in the absence of the ostensive signal. Subsequent experiments showed that learning was less successful when the ostensive signal was absent even if an interesting but non-ostensive social stimulus preceded the same cued events.

The comparator model of infant visual habituation and dishabituation: recent insights.

Current knowledge of the perceptual and cognitive abilities in infancy is largely based on the visual habituation-dishabituation method. According to the comparator model [e.g., Sokolov (1963a) Perception and the conditioned reflex. Oxford: Pergamon Press], habituation refers to stimulus encoding and dishabituation refers to discriminatory memory performance. The review also describes the dual-process theory and the attention disengagement approach. The dual-process theory points to the impact of natural stimulus preferences on habituation-dishabituation processes. The attention disengagement approach emphasizes the contribution of the ability to shift the attention away from a stimulus. Moreover, arguments for the cognitive interpretation of visual habituation and dishabituations are discussed. These arguments are provided by physiological studies and by research on interindividual differences. Overall, the review shows that current research supports the comparator model. It emphasizes that the investigation of habituation and dishabituation expands our understanding of visual attention processes in infants.