Development of sustained, focused attention in young children during free play.

Ruff, Holly A.; Lawson, Katharine R.

doi:10.1037/0012-1649.26.1.85

Cited by 230 publications

(208 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(27 reference statements)

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“…Posner and Rothbart (2000;Rothbart & Rueda, 2005) contend that rapid development of frontal neural systems, particularly the anterior cingulate, during early childhood may underlie trends toward greater control of attention and behavior. Consistent with this reasoning, the ability to exercise inhibitory control in delaying gratification increases from 18 to 30 months (Vaughn, Kopp, & Krakow, 1984), and focused attention during free play increases between 2.5 and 4.5 years (Ruff & Lawson, 1990).…”

Section: Development Of Temperament During Toddlerhoodsupporting

confidence: 50%

“…The most profound changes during this period, however, were expected for scales associated with Effortful Control. Posner and Rothbart (2000;Rothbart & Rueda, 2005) contend that rapid development of frontal neural systems, particularly the anterior cingulate, during early (Vaughn, Kopp, & Krakow, 1984), and focused attention during free play increases between 2.5 and 4.5 years (Ruff & Lawson, 1990). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Measurement of fine-grained aspects of toddler temperament: The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire

Putnam

Gartstein

Rothbart

2006

Infant Behavior and Development

692

642

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This article describes the development, reliability, and factor structure of a finely differentiated (18 dimensions) parent-report measure of temperament in 1.5 to 3-year-old children, using a crosssectional sample (N = 317) and a longitudinal sample of primary (N = 104) and secondary (N = 61) caregivers. Adequate internal consistency was demonstrated for all scales and moderate interrater reliability was evident for most scales. Longitudinal stability correlations were primarily large over 6-and 12-month spans and moderate to large from 18 to 36 months. Factor analysis revealed a three-factor structure of Surgency/Extraversion, Negative Affectivity, and Effortful Control. In both samples and for both primary and secondary caregivers, older children received higher scores for Attention Focusing, Discomfort, Inhibitory Control, and Positive Anticipation. Primary caregivers rated females higher in Fear, and lower in High-intensity Pleasure, than males; secondary caregivers rated females higher than males in several aspects of Effortful Control.Increases in the number of empirical studies of temperament in recent years (Rothbart & Bates, 1998, in press) have been matched by an expanded and more finely defined list of dimensions considered within the temperament realm. Although fine-grained instruments have been developed to assess temperament in infants (Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003) and older children (Rothbart, Ahadi, Hershey, & Fisher, 2001), an analogous instrument appropriate for use with children between the ages of 1 and 3 has not been made available. The current study describes the psychometric characteristics, factor structure, and demographic correlates of an instrument designed to fill this gap: the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ).The ECBQ was originally designed to supplement the Toddler Behavior Assessment Questionnaire (TBAQ; Goldsmith, 1996), a widely-used parent-report temperament questionnaire for young children. The TBAQ includes 108 items that address five aspects of temperament: Activity Level, Pleasure, Social Fearfulness, Anger Proneness, and Interest/ Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sam Putnam, Department of Psychology, Bowdoin College, 6900 College Station, Brunswick, ME 04011. Persistence. Goldsmith (1996) documented internal consistency and interrater reliability of the instrument, as well as convergence with other temperament measures. Subsequent studies (e.g., Eiden, Edwards, & Leonard, 2004;Kochanska & Knaack, 2003;Lemery, Goldsmith, Klinnert, & Mrazek, 1999) have provided support for the construct validity of the instrument. The value of this measure is further indicated by successful translations to Japanese (Kusanagi, Chen, & Hoshi, 2000), Spanish (Salinas, Montesinos, & Carnicero, 1999), and Dutch (Van Bakel & Riksen-Walraven, 2004).Several aspects of temperament assessed by the new instrument, but not the TBAQ, reflect differences between our theoretical approach and the approach that guided the creation of the TBAQ. Whereas Gold...

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Section: Development Of Temperament During Toddlerhoodsupporting

confidence: 50%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Measurement of fine-grained aspects of toddler temperament: The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire

Putnam

Gartstein

Rothbart

2006

Infant Behavior and Development

692

642

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Although the importance of hand actions has been recognized by others (e.g., Ruff & Lawson, 1990;Woodward, 2003), their structure as they act on objects from the first-person view may prove particularly informative.…”

Section: Hands-mentioning

confidence: 99%

What's in View for Toddlers? Using a Head Camera to Study Visual Experience

Yoshida

Smith

2008

Infancy

183

179

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This article reports 2 experiments using a new method to study 18-to 24-month-olds' visual experiences as they interact with objects. Experiment 1 presents evidence on the coupling of head and eye movements and thus the validity of the head camera view of the infant's visual field in the geometry of the task context. Experiment 2 demonstrates the use of this method in the naturalistic context of toy play with a parent. The results point to the embodied nature of toddlers' attentional strategies and to importance of hands and hand actions in their visual experience of objects. The head camera thus appears to be a promising method that, despite some limitations, will yield new insights about the ecology and content of young children's experiences.Cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor capabilities. (Thelen, 2000, p. 5) Developmental psychologists have long been interested in the nature of the input, in the everyday experiences that characterize early childhood and the role of those experiences in cognitive development. One method used by many (including is) is to record via a video camera the child's naturalistic interactions with toys and social partners in an effort to understand the structure and regularities inherent in these everyday interactions. There is, however, a potentially fundamental problem with this approach that is illustrated in Figure 1. The camera records a third-person view (Figure 1a), the view of an outside observer. This view is not the child's view, which might be more like that shown in Figure 1b. The thirdperson camera provides a fixed and broad view that is not at the body scale of a young child, and when coded by adults for the information present, is potentially biased by the adult's conceptualization of the structure of the larger scene. The purpose of this article is to present preliminary results on a new method, that although far from perfect, may enable researchers to gain new insights into the contents of visual experience from the young learner's point of view.This goal is consistent with a collection honoring themes in Esther Thelen's work because the input from the child's point of view is intimately tied to the child's body and to movement. The role of the body, action, and self-generated experiences is not a well-studied domain within cognitive development, although there are increasing calls for and evidence showing the value of such an approach (e.g., Reiser, Lockman, & Nelson, 2005;Smith & Gasser, 2005;Thelen, 2000) and ample demonstrations of the importance of self-generated experiences in perceptual learning (e.g., Adolph & Berger, 2006;Bertenthal, Campos, & Kermoian, 1994;Gibson, 1969;Lockman, 1990;Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). The goal of this study is to specifically develop a method to study the first-person view-a view intimately tied to self-action-in a developmental period (18-24 months) and task context (toy play) important to language and category learning. Ideally, we would like a dy...

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“…This discrepancy between experiments raises the possibility that the interaction with age in Experiment 1 could be task specific, possibly due to age-related differences in attending consistently to the task of making multiple ratings. 10 Although we attempted to compensate for this possibility by reducing the number of trials for younger children, any task that requires sustained attention is likely to reveal stronger associations among older participants, who have increased attentional capacity (Ruff & Lawson, 1990). By contrast, the interactive and creative aspects of the procedure in Experiment 2 appeared to engage most children throughout the test session.…”

Section: Model Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…10 Although we attempted to compensate for this possibility by reducing the number of trials for younger children, any task that requires sustained attention is likely to reveal stronger associations among older participants, who have increased attentional capacity (Ruff & Lawson, 1990). By contrast, the interactive and creative aspects of the procedure in Experiment 2 appeared to engage most children throughout the test session.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectancy in melody: Tests of children and adults.

Schellenberg¹,

Adachi²,

Purdy³

et al. 2002

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Melodic expectancies among children and adults were examined. In Experiment 1, adults, 11-year-olds, and 8-year-olds rated how well individual test tones continued fragments of melodies. In Experiment 2, 11-, 8-, and 5-year-olds sang continuations to 2-tone stimuli. Response patterns were analyzed using 2 models of melodic expectancy. Despite having fewer predictor variables, the 2-factor model (E. G. Schellenberg, 1997) equaled or surpassed the implication-realization model (E. Narmour, 1990) in predictive accuracy. Listeners of all ages expected the next tone in a melody to be proximate in pitch to the tone heard most recently. Older listeners also expected reversals of pitch direction, specifically for tones that changed direction after a disruption of proximity and for tones that formed symmetric patterns.

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Development of sustained, focused attention in young children during free play.

Cited by 230 publications

References 30 publications

Measurement of fine-grained aspects of toddler temperament: The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire

Measurement of fine-grained aspects of toddler temperament: The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire

What's in View for Toddlers? Using a Head Camera to Study Visual Experience

Expectancy in melody: Tests of children and adults.

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