Infant temperament and family socio-economic status in relation to the emergence of attention regulation

Ángela Conejero,M Rosario Rueda

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-28831-x

Abstract

Attention regulation refers to the ability to control attention according to goals and intentions. Disengagement of attention is one of the first mechanisms of attention regulation that emerges in infancy, involving attention control and flexibility. Disengaging attention from emotional stimuli (such as threat-related cues) is of particular interest given its implication for self-regulation. A second mechanism of attention control is the ability to flexibly switch attention according to changing conditions. In our study, we investigated 9 to 12-month-olds’ disengagement and flexibility of attention, and examined the contribution of both temperament and socioeconomic status (SES) to individual differences in the emergence of these attention regulation skills at the end of the first year of life. Our results show that both difficulty to disengage from fearful faces and poorer attention flexibility were associated with higher levels of temperamental Negative Affectivity (NA). Additionally, attention flexibility moderated the effect of NA on disengagement from fearful faces. Infants with higher NA and poorer attention flexibility showed the greatest difficulty to disengage. Low SES was also associated with poorer attention flexibility, association that was mediated by infants’ NA. These results suggest that attention flexibility together with temperament and environmental factors are key to understand individual differences in attention regulation from threat-related stimuli as early as from infancy. Our findings also stress the importance of interactions between environmental and constitutional factors for understanding individual differences in the emergence of attention regulation.

Highlights

The voluntary control of attention is a central aspect of self-regulation[1]
The emergence of endogenous control of attention in infancy is thought to build the foundations for more complex emotion regulation skills that will develop in the upcoming years[8]
There were no differences in disengagement between happy and neutral faces (F(1,54) = 0.22; p > 0.05), whereas disengagement was more difficult for fearful faces compared to neutral (F(1,54) = 18.48, p < 0.001), or happy faces (F(1,54) = 9.43, p < 0.01)

Summary

Introduction

The voluntary control of attention is a central aspect of self-regulation[1]. In the attention network model proposed by Posner and Petersen[2,3], the executive control of attention (i.e. executive attention) is one of the three main functions of attention together with orienting and alerting. Young infants are often unable to disengage attention from foveated stimuli, even after being sufficiently explored[4] This is because in the first months of life attention is mainly controlled by the superior colliculus[5], a brain structure involved in attentional engagement. Attention flexibility allows the adjustment to situational demands by applying inhibitory control over dominant but inappropriate behavioural tendencies, enabling the selection of more adaptive responses[25] This function is supported by the maturation of frontal brain structures within the executive attention network such as the dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices. No studies to date have investigated how attention flexibility contributes to incipient individual differences in disengagement of attention from threat-related stimuli in infancy. Reactivity is classified along a negative/avoidant (i.e. negative affectivity, NA) and a positive/approaching (i.e. surgency, SUR) axis, whereas regulation has been linked to executive attention[29]

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