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Attention, a cognitive capacity that is important in its own right, is an integral aspect of other cognitive capacities such as perception and memory. The ability to select one part of the complex stimuli in one's environment is necessary for survival. Even more critical is the ability to sustain attention, since without sustained attention there can be no learning.
In a recent study, Chen Yu and Linda Smith (Indiana University-Bloomington) address how this critical capacity arises and what factors influence its development. Specifically, these researchers ask: Does the capacity for sustained attention arise through maturation alone, pari passu, along with other cognitive capacities, or does particular environmental input facilitate its development? As the title of their article states, they found significant effects of specific caregiver behaviors on an infant's capacity for sustained attention. According to a press release from Indiana University, theirs is the “first study to show a direct connection between how long a caregiver looks at an object and how long an infant's attention remains focused on that same object.”
Their study population consisted of 36 infant-parent dyads (19 male infants, 17 female, ages 11 to 13 months) engaged in free-flowing interactions with three toys (pretested as engaging and novel). The data were