Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA.
Dev Sci. 2011 Sep;14(5):1150-60. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01066.x. Epub 2011 Jul 26.
A current theory of attention posits that several micro-indices of attentional vigilance are dependent on activation of the locus coeruleus, a brainstem nucleus that regulates cortical norepinephrine activity (Aston-Jones et al., 1999). This theory may account for many findings in the infant literature, while highlighting important new areas for research and theory on infant attention. We examined the visual behaviors of n = 16 infants (6-7 months) while they attended to multiple spatially distributed targets in a naturalistic environment. We coded four measures of attentional vigilance, adapted from studies of norepinergic modulation of animal attention: rate of fixations, duration of fixations, latency to reorientation, and target 'hits'. These measures showed a high degree of coherence in individual infants, in parallel with findings from animal studies. Results also suggest that less vigilant infants showed greater habituation to the trial structure and more attentiveness to less salient stimuli during periods of high attentional competition. This pattern of results is predicted by the Aston-Jones model of attention, but could not be explained by the standard information processing model.
目前的注意力理论假设，几种注意力警戒的微观指标依赖于蓝斑核（locus coeruleus）的激活，蓝斑核是调节大脑皮层去甲肾上腺素活动的脑干核（Aston-Jones 等人，1999 年）。这一理论可以解释婴儿文献中的许多发现，同时强调了婴儿注意力研究和理论的重要新领域。我们观察了 16 名（6-7 个月大）婴儿在自然环境中同时关注多个空间分布目标时的视觉行为。我们从对动物注意力的去甲肾上腺素调节的研究中改编了四个注意力警戒的测量指标：注视率、注视持续时间、重新定向潜伏期和目标“命中”。这些指标在个体婴儿中表现出高度的一致性，与动物研究的结果一致。结果还表明，警觉性较低的婴儿在注意力竞争激烈的时期对试验结构的习惯化程度更高，对不那么显著的刺激更关注。这种结果模式是由 Aston-Jones 的注意力模型预测的，但不能用标准的信息处理模型来解释。
