No abstract

The research reported here was supported by Grant HD 11916 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.The author is grateful to Katharine Lawson and Gerald Turkewitz for their helpful comments on a previous draft and to Mary Capozzoh, Karen Cumbus, and Phyllis Klein for their patient help in scoring videotapes and organizing data Requests for reprints should be sent to Holly A. Ruff, Room 222

The purpose of this project was to investigate the maintenance of focused attention in the first 5 years. In Study 1, 67 children were seen at 1, 2, and 3.S years of age in free play with a number of age-appropriate toys. The duration of focused attention increased significantly over the ages studied. At 1 year, the children's focused attention showed a decline within the session; at the 2 older ages, however, focused attention neither decreased nor increased. In Study 2, children at 2.5,3.5, and 4.5 years were also seen in free play. The results replicated the significant increase in focused attention over age and the lack of change within the session. Older children focused attention significantly more on construction and problem solving than did younger children, and manifested less inattention by physical movement away from the toys. The observed development in focused attention, therefore, is probably related both to the increased variety and complexity of the child's activities and to increasing inhibitory control.

This observational study describes the early development of attention and discractibility. Under several conditions of distraction, 172 children at 10, 26, and 42 months of age played with toys. Attention to the toys was coded as casual, settled, or focused. All 3 levels of attention changed with age, withcasual attention decreasing and focused attention increasing. The 10-month-olds were more distractible than the other children, even during focused attention. The infants were most distracted by the auditory-visual distractor, whereas the oldest children were most distracted by the visual distractor. Some 42-month-olds showed evidence of being more focused in the presence of distractors. Overall, the results point to a developmental transition in the processes underlying attention during play.

The purpose of the project was to investigate attention in infants as they manipulate objects. It was hypothesized that examining, in contrast to other activity, reflects focused attention and active intake of information. The first study with 7- and 12-month-olds supported the hypothesis; examining declined with increasing familiarity, while other behaviors, such as mouthing and banging, did not, and examining occurred before other behaviors temporally. The latency to examine declined significantly with age. The second and third studies investigated the effects of age and familiarity on both latency to and duration of examining. Latency again decreased with age but did not change with increasing familiarity. In contrast, duration of examining did not vary systematically with age but declined sharply with familiarity. In a fourth study, latency to examine and duration of examining were related to different measures of attention at 3 1/2 years. The combination of results suggests that the latency and duration measures reflect different aspects of attention--a short-term reaction to object novelty and a more sustained response to the object and its characteristics.