The posterior visual spatial attention system involves a number of separable computations that allow orienting to visual locations. We have studied one of these computations, inhibition of return, in 3-, 4-, 6-, 12-, and 18--month-old infants and adults. Our results indicate that this computation develops rapidly between 3 and 6 months, in conjunction with the ability to program eye movements to specific locations. These findings demonstrate that an attention computation involving the mid-brain eye movement system develops after the third month of life. We suggest how this development might influence the infant's ability to represent and expect visual objects.

The term attention is used to describe the focusing of cognitive processes onto a subset of the information that is currently available. This focusing is useful whenever a given cognitive process is faced with multiple sources of input, and attention is therefore important across a wide variety of tasks. Attention plays several distinct computational roles, including binding together the features of an object, minimizing interference in working memory, and mitigating the deleterious effects of noise. Recent research also indicates that attention can operate on a variety of different representational formats, including spatial representations and abstract object‐based representations. Most theories of attention have assumed that attention is a unitary process that operates at a single stage of processing, but it is now clear that it operates within different cognitive systems under different conditions. Thus, attentional focusing does not appear to be achieved by a unitary attentional process; instead, focusing appears to be implemented by a collection of partially independent attentional processes that are embedded within other cognitive processes. However, these attentional processes must work together to produce unified behavioral output, and recent research has focused extensively on the control systems that coordinate the allocation of attention.

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The onset of motion captures attention during visual search even if the motion is not task relevant, which suggests that motion onsets capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner. However, we have recently shown that stimulus-driven attentional capture by abruptly appearing objects is attenuated under conditions of high perceptual load. In the present study, we examined the influence of perceptual load on attentional capture by another type of dynamic stimulus: the onset of motion. Participants searched for a target letter through briefly presented low-and high-load displays. On each trial, two irrelevant flankers also appeared, one with a motion onset and one that was static. Flankers defined by a motion onset captured attention in the low-load but not in the high-load displays. This modulation of capture in high-load displays was not the result of overall lengthening of reaction times (RTs) in this condition, since search for a single low-contrast target lengthened RTs but did not influence capture. These results, together with those of previous studies, suggest that perceptual load can modulate attentional capture by dynamic stimuli.