Abstract
This study measured changes in switches of attention between 1 and 9 months of age in 67 typically developing infants. Remote eye-tracking (Tobii X120) was used to measure saccadic latencies, related to switches of fixation, as a measure of shifts of attention, from a central stimulus to a peripheral visual target, measured in the Fixation Shift Paradigm. Fixation shifts occur later if the central fixation stimulus stays visible when the peripheral target appears (competition condition), than if the central stimulus disappears as the peripheral target appears (non-competition condition). This difference decreases with age. Our results show significantly faster disengagement in infants over 4 months than in the younger group, and provide more precise measures of fixation shifts, than behavioural observation with the same paradigm. Reduced saccadic latencies in the course of a test session indicate a novel learning effect. The Fixation Shift Paradigm combined with remote eye-tracking measures showed improved temporal and spatial accuracy compared to direct observation by a trained observer, and allowed an increased number of trials in a short testing time. This makes it an infant-friendly non-invasive procedure, involving minimal observational training, suitable for use in future studies of clinical populations to detect early attentional abnormalities in the first few months of life.
Highlights
The ability to shift attention from one visual stimulus to another represents a crucial aspect of human development, allowing infants to direct processing and learning to relevant events, and serving as the basis for developing adult mechanisms of selective attention
With the increased spatial accuracy of the eye-tracker in comparison to former methods, we investigate differences in fixation position in relation to the target, such as the undershoot of initial saccades in young infants reported previously [14]
Saccade latencies were longer in the competition condition than in the non-competition condition, and this effect was greater in the younger group of infants under 4 months of age, supporting the findings of former studies using this paradigm [2,3]
Summary
The ability to shift attention from one visual stimulus to another represents a crucial aspect of human development, allowing infants to direct processing and learning to relevant events, and serving as the basis for developing adult mechanisms of selective attention. Detection of deficits in shifts of attention is important for the possibility of effective early intervention. Two well-established behavioural methods, using shifts of gaze to examine attention in young infants, are the Fixation Shift Paradigm—FSP [1–3,review: 4,5], and the gap paradigm [6,7,8,9,10,11]. In the FSP task infants are initially shown one stimulus centred on a screen. When the infant fixates this central stimulus, the tester initiates the appearance of a second target in the PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0142505. When the infant fixates this central stimulus, the tester initiates the appearance of a second target in the PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0142505 December 1, 2015
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