Department of Psychology, Chuo University, 742-1 Higashi-Nakano, Hachioji, Tokyo, 192-0393, Japan.
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 5-3-1 Kojimachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 102-0083, Japan.
Exp Brain Res. 2022 Sep;240(9):2277-2284. doi: 10.1007/s00221-022-06428-1. Epub 2022 Jul 29.
When looking for an object, we identify it by selectively focusing our attention to a specific feature, known as feature-based attention. This basic attentional system has been reported in young children; however, little is known of whether infants could use feature-based attention. We have introduced a newly developed anticipation-looking task, where infants learned to direct their attention endogenously to a specific feature based on the learned feature (color or orientation), in 60 preverbal infants aged 7-8 months. We found that preverbal infants aged 7-8 months can direct their attention endogenously to the specific target feature among irrelevant features, thus showing the feature-based attentional selection. Experiment 2 bolstered this finding by demonstrating that infants directed their attention depending on the familiarized feature that belongs to a never-experienced object. These results that infants can form anticipation by color and orientation reflect they could drive their attention through feature-based selection.
当我们寻找一个物体时，我们会通过选择性地将注意力集中在一个特定的特征上，来识别它，这被称为基于特征的注意力。这种基本的注意系统在幼儿中已经被报道过；然而，对于婴儿是否能够使用基于特征的注意力，我们知之甚少。我们引入了一种新开发的预期注视任务，在 60 名 7-8 个月大的婴儿中，他们学习根据所学的特征（颜色或方向），自主地将注意力集中到特定的特征上。我们发现，7-8 个月大的婴儿可以自主地将注意力集中到无关特征中的特定目标特征上，从而表现出基于特征的注意力选择。实验 2 通过证明婴儿根据属于从未体验过的物体的熟悉特征来引导他们的注意力，进一步支持了这一发现。这些结果表明，婴儿可以通过颜色和方向形成预期，这反映出他们可以通过基于特征的选择来驱动他们的注意力。
