Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Psychology

Major Professor

Shannon M Ross-Sheehy

Committee Members

Aaron Buss, Kristy Allen, Shannon Ross-Sheehy

Abstract

Visual attention is a foundational aspect of early cognitive development. While visual attention is related to a variety of longitudinal outcomes, it remains unclear which components of attention (e.g., attention orienting, attention vigilance, overall engagement) drive this relationship. The current project seeks to address this question by examining how the smallest unit of attention, eye movements, relate to later cognitive outcomes. To accomplish this, reflexive eye movements were examined using the Infant Orienting with Attention Task (IOWA; Ross-Sheehy et. al., 2015). Saccadic reaction time (SRT) and accuracy scores were then used to classify 11-month-old infants into three attentional phenotypes: high flexible, high reactive, and low reactive (Ross-Sheehy et. al., 2020). High flexible infants showed strong spatial cueing effects, fast SRTs, and moderate accuracy suggesting good cortical development and inhibitory control. High reactive infants also showed strong cueing effects and fast SRTs, but had substantially lower accuracy, suggesting relatively poor inhibitory control. Lastly, low reactive infants had poor spatial attention, relatively slow SRTs and low accuracy, suggesting relatively limited cortical development. It is currently unclear if these early phenotypic differences will contribute to longer-term outcomes as well. To test this, we retested these infants at 4-years-of-age using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire-3 (ASQ). If differences in orienting attention captured by these attentional phenotypes drive long-term differences in general cognitive development, we would expect to see systematic differences as a function of their 11-month-old attentional phenotype classification. Analyses revealed that high flexible children had significantly higher ASQ scores than low reactive children in three domains, including communication, gross motor, and problem-solving. These findings suggest that attentional phenotypes extend beyond low-level eye movements and provide the foundation for later developmental outcomes. These results demonstrate low-level eye movement patterns measured at 11-months using the IOWA task are stable and contribute to long-term developmental differences across both motor and cognitive domains.

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