Infants were followed longitudinally to document the relationship between docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) levels and the development of attention. Erythrocyte (red-blood cell; RBC) phospholipid DHA (percentage of total fatty acids) was measured from infants and mothers at delivery. Infants were assessed in infant-control habituation at 4, 6, and 8 months augmented with psychophysiological measures, and on free-play attention and distractibility paradigms at 12 and 18 months. Infants whose mothers had high DHA at birth showed an accelerated decline in looking over the 1st year and increases in examining during single-object exploration and less distractibility in the 2nd year. These findings are consistent with evidence suggesting a link between DHA and cognitive development in infancy.

A longitudinal sample of 226 infants were tested monthly on habituation and novelty preference tasks, augmented with simultaneous heart rate recording from 3 to 9 months of age. Infants were then administered the Bayley Scales of Infant Development II (BSID) and MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) at 12, 18, and 24 months. Prior findings regarding the decline in look duration with age were replicated. Age‐based factors were extracted from the monthly assessments, an early attention factor from 3 to 6 months and a late attention factor from 7 to 9 months. A novelty preference factor, which grouped recognition performance at 4 and 6 months of age, was also derived. The late attention factor correlated negatively with a factor score derived from the BSID mental index, and the novelty preference aggregate was correlated positively with a factor score derived from the MCDI production scores. Two clusters of infants were derived based on the developmental course of change from the early attention to late attention look duration aggregates: One cluster (n= 150) decreased strongly, and another (n= 50) increased. Infants belonging to these clusters subsequently differed on both the BSID and MCDI outcomes, with the former cluster showing distinct advantages that increased as the outcome assessments progressed from 12 to 24 months of age. This finding was bolstered by subsequent analyses of data from infants who completed all tests run from 3 to 9 months. The results of this study suggest that the developmental course of attention during infancy is an important clue to cognitive and language outcomes in early childhood.

Young infants have repeatedly been shown to be slower than older infants to shift fixation from a midline stimulus to a peripheral stimulus. This is generally thought to reflect maturation of the neural substrates that mediate the disengagement of attention, but this developmental difference may also be attributable to young infants' slower processing of the midline stimulus. This possibility was tested with 3- and 7-month-old infants in 2 experiments in which the degree of familiarity of the midline stimulus was manipulated across repeated trials. The results of these experiments demonstrated that the processing of midline content does affect infants' ocular latencies to a peripheral stimulus but that developmental differences in such processing do not account for developmental differences in disengagement seen across the 1st year.

Despite the use of visual habituation over the past half century, relatively little is known about its underlying processes. We analyzed heart rate (HR) taken simultaneous with looking during infant-controlled habituation sessions collected longitudinally at 4, 6, and 8 months of age with the goal of examining how HR and HR-defined phases of attention change across habituation. There were four major findings. First, the depth and topography of decelerations and proportion of sustained attention (SA) did not vary across habituation at any age, which suggested (in contrast to the tenets of comparator theory) the persistence of substantial cognitive activity at the end of visual habituation. Second, attention termination (AT) robustly declined across trials, suggesting that, contrary to prior thinking, AT might be a sensitive indicant of visual learning. Third, infants at all ages showed an HR increase (startle) to stimulus onset on the first trial, the magnitude of which was associated with subsequent delayed HR deceleration and less SA; thus, stimulus events affect processing Correspondence should be sent to John Colombo,

We evaluated over 200 participants semiannually from 12 to 48 months of age on measures of intellectual (Bayley Scales, Stanford-Binet Scale) and verbal (MacArthur-Bates Inventory, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) status. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear (growth curve) analyses were applied to address the nature of development and individual differences during this time. Structural analyses showed a strong and robust simplex model from infancy to the preschool period, with no evidence of qualitative reorganizations or discontinuities. Growth-curve modeling revealed significant associations between level factors across the early and later measures of cognition, providing further evidence of continuity; the growth trajectory from the Bayley through 24 months predicted growth in a nonverbal factor, but not in a verbal factor. Altogether, the findings reveal continuous and stable development in intellectual function from late infancy through the preschool years. Additionally, the high level of continuity demonstrated across these ages was observed to be largely independent of growth in vocabulary.The study of intellect and its development continues to be a primary focus in the area of psychology (e.g., Bornstein, Slater, Brown, Roberts, & Barrett, 1997; Craik & Bialystock, 2006;Lewis, 1976). The traditional view of early intellectual development (see Bayley, 1940;Honzik, 1976;Hunt, 1967;Hunt & Bayley, 1971) has long championed the view that early measures of developmental status were unrelated to later intelligence. A modified view of this position emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, suggesting that the first two years of life featured periods of discontinuous development due to reorganizations of cognitive function Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to John Colombo (colombo@ku.edu) or Todd Little (yhat@ku.edu) at Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS 66045-7555. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptIntelligence. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 1. McCall, 1976McCall, , 1983 McCall, Eichhorn, & Hogarty, 1977;McCall, Hogarty, & Hurlburt, 1972;Lewis, 1973).The view of discontinuity and reorganization was initially challenged during the 1980s and 1990s, with repeated findings showing that discrete indices of attention, memory, and speed of encoding or processing were modestly but significantly correlated with more mature forms of intelligence (see reviews by Bornstein & Sigman, 1986;Colombo, 1993;McCall, 1994;McCall & Carriger, ...