Long-Term Stability of Individual Differences in Sustained Attention in the Early Years

Ruff, Holly A.; Lawson, Katharine R.; Parrinello, Roseanne; Weissberg, Renata

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1990.tb02760.x

Cited by 46 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(14 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…For this measure, observers assessed children’s attention across a variety of tasks and situations during the lab visit, many of which were not specifically designed to evaluate attention. Other investigators have found global ratings of attention to be similarly stable, consistent with other observed quantitative measures, and to have predictive value (Lawson & Ruff, 2001, 2004; Ruff et al ., 1990). Global ratings may allow an observer to sample children’s behaviour across a range of contexts and to make inferences about common elements in patterns of behaviour (Cairns & Green, 1979).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

“…Parental reports of infants’ duration of orienting also have been substantially correlated across multiple assessment points between 3 and 13.5 months of age (Rothbart, Derryberry, & Hershey, 2000), and parent ratings of attentional focusing appear to have moderate to large correlations across 6-, 12-, and 18-month spans during toddlerhood (Putnam et al ., 2006). In terms of prediction, one study demonstrated that observers’ global ratings of 1-year-old children’s focused attention across independent and dyadic play and a problem-solving task were negatively related to inattention on a response-reaction task at 3.5 years, and 2-year-old ratings predicted focused attention observed at 3.5 years (Ruff, Lawson, Parrinello, & Weissberg, 1990). …”

Section: The Development Of Attention Across Toddlerhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Focused attention in toddlers: measurement, stability, and relations to negative emotion and parenting

Gaertner

Spinrad

Eisenberg

2008

Infant and Child Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This longitudinal study examined individual differences and correlates of focused attention when toddlers were approximately 18 months old (T1; n = 256) and a year later (T2; n = 230). Toddlers' attention and negative emotionality were reported by mothers and non-parental caregivers and rated globally by observers. Toddlers' focused attention also was observed during two mother-child interactions and an independent play task. Measures of maternal emotional support and control were obtained via self-report and observation. Some contemporaneous relations among indices of toddlers' attention were obtained, particularly for observed measures. Moreover, all measures of attention demonstrated stability across time. Negative emotionality was negatively related to toddlers' observed attention at both ages, whereas maternal praise had positive concurrent associations. Maternal control was negatively related to observed observed attention at T2 and also predicted longitudinally, but only for children who initially had low or moderate attention. The findings suggest that individual differences in focused attention evidence stability early in life but can be influenced by adult socialization. Keywordsattention; toddlers; negative emotion; parenting Contemporary theorists have deemed attention a core dimension of temperament in infants and children (Rothbart & Bates, 1998. A substantial body of literature speaks to the role of attention in learning and cognitive development, and attentional abilities predict developmental level and IQ, problem solving and language skills, and performance on tests of ability even early in life (Bono & Stifter, 2003;Choudhury & Gorman, 2000;Dixon & Smith, 2000;Lawson & Ruff, 2004; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2003). Moreover, compelling evidence suggests the importance of attentional processes for other domains of young children's functioning, including effortful control (Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000), compliance (Hill & Braungart-Rieker, 2002), ability to delay gratification (Mischel, Ebbesen, & Raskoff Zeiss, 1972), and emotion-related regulation and social adjustment (e.g. Eisenberg, Fabes, Guthrie, & Reiser, 2000). Toddlerhood is an important period in the study of attention, given the significant developmental shift in the nature of attention occurring near the end of the first year, coupled with the emergence and increased consolidation of self-regulation across early childhood (Rothbart, Posner, & Kieras, 2006). The purpose of the present study was to investigate the stability and interrelations among indices of toddlers' focused attention from NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript the second to third year of life, and to examine the contributions of negative emotionality and parenting. The Development of Attention across ToddlerhoodAttention refers to visual perception, orientation toward, and engagement with aspects of the external environment and includes components of 'selectivity, state of engagement, and higherlevel co...

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: The Development Of Attention Across Toddlerhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focused attention in toddlers: measurement, stability, and relations to negative emotion and parenting

Gaertner

Spinrad

Eisenberg

2008

Infant and Child Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To more objectively define sustained attention, we turned the approach around and defined sustained attention as looks longer than 3 sec, the average duration of concentrated attention for 1-year-olds reported in the earlier work [17]. This threshold ensures that the defined sustained attention bouts are on the tail of the distribution (exceeding the mean of the overall distribution), and thus at the upper end of what children this age can do when visually focusing attention on a single object [17, 27]. More specifically, we operationally defined 3 seconds of consistent looking within the ROI for a single object without any looks elsewhere as the threshold for sustained attention by the infant.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social Origins of Sustained Attention in One-Year-Old Human Infants

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Summary The ability to sustain attention is a major achievement in human development and is generally believed to be the developmental product of increasing self-regulatory and endogenous (i.e., internal, top-down, voluntary) control over one’s attention and cognitive systems [1–5]. Because sustained attention in late infancy is predictive of future development and because early deficits in sustained attention are markers for later diagnoses of attentional disorders [6], sustained attention is often viewed as a constitutional and individual property of the infant [6–9]. However, humans are social animals; developmental pathways for seemingly non-social competencies evolved within the social group and therefore may be dependent on social experience [10–13]. Here, we show that social context matters for the duration of sustained attention episodes in one-year-old infants during toy play. Using head-mounted eye-tracking to record moment-by-moment gaze data from both parents and infants, we found that when the social partner (parent) visually attended to the object to which infant attention was directed, infants, after the parent’s look, extended their duration of visual attention to the object. Looks to the same object by two social partners is a well-studied phenomenon known as joint attention which has been shown to be critical to early word learning and to the development of social skills [14, 15]. The present findings implicate joint attention in the development of the child’s own sustained attention, and thus challenge the current understanding of the origins of individual differences in sustained attention, providing a new and potentially malleable developmental pathway to the self-regulation of attention.

show abstract

“…Difficulties in sustaining and directing attention have been linked with diminished social competence (Raver, Blackburn, Bancroft, & Torp, 1999), increased physical aggression (Eisenberg, Fabes, Nyman, Bernzweig, & Pinuelas, 1994), and externalizing problems across the spectrum (Olson, Sameroff, Kerr, Lopez, & Wellman, 2005). For example, toddler’s inability to sustain and direct attention to toys and activities has been linked with difficulties tolerating frustration, as well as hyperactivity and attention problems in early childhood (Ruff, Lawson, Parrinello, & Weissberg, 1990). With respect to the interparental relationship, in a longitudinal study of 6-year-olds and their parents, Davies and colleagues (2008) found evidence for attention difficulties as a mechanism linking interparental conflict and children’s school adjustment.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Interparental aggression, attention skills, and early childhood behavior problems

et al. 2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The current study explored longitudinal associations between interparental aggression, the development of child attention skills, and early childhood behavior problems in a diverse sample of 636 families living in predominately low-income, nonmetropolitan communities. The results of latent-variable, cross-lagged longitudinal models revealed that maternal-reported interparental aggression in infancy predicted reduced observed attention skills in toddlerhood; no association was observed, however, between attention in infancy and interparental aggression during the toddler years. Further, reduced toddler attention and high interparental aggression were both associated with increased risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms and conduct problems at 3 years of age. Processes largely operated in similar ways regardless of child gender or low-income status, although a few differences were observed. Overall, the results suggest that interparental aggression undermines attention development, putting children’s early behavioral adjustment at risk.

show abstract

Long-Term Stability of Individual Differences in Sustained Attention in the Early Years

Cited by 46 publications

References 23 publications

Focused attention in toddlers: measurement, stability, and relations to negative emotion and parenting

Focused attention in toddlers: measurement, stability, and relations to negative emotion and parenting

The Social Origins of Sustained Attention in One-Year-Old Human Infants

Interparental aggression, attention skills, and early childhood behavior problems

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About