Individual Differences in the Measurement of Early Cognitive Growth

Abstract

Before proceeding to the text itself it would be helpful to preview what is to follow; this would allow the reader to arrange the SUbsequent material into the pattern intended by the writer. The chapter is divided into several sections which have the function of moving from the more general to the highly specific. The first section deals with some broad issues surrounding the topic of attention. The second section, as a consequence of this earlier discussion, proposes some models for viewing the attentional process itself. The third section deals with the more specific issue of the relationships between normal intellectual functioning and attention while the last, and most specific section, deals with eNS dysfunction in infants and children and attention. This section is concerned therefore with the more specific consequences of SOfie of the broader, more theoretically oriented sections. The summary section integrates the entire chapter. studying Attention The study of attention, like much investigation in psychology, is not new, and often recurs as a theme. The terminology changes. Technology provides new instruments and more sensitive measures. But many of the problems remain the same (L~wis, 1967a). Preyer's work in the late 1880's (Preyer, 1888) serves as an example. As are an increasing number of contemporary researchers, he was deeply curious about infant behavior, specif-icallY, as his book title suggests, the Mind of the Child. Caref~reading of his work reveals a great interest in and study of attention as a means of investigating the development of the infant's mind. His observations wer~among the first descriptions of eye-hand regard, for example. Another example of early observations related to contemporary issues of attention are Darwin's (1897) writings on infancy. In a biographical sketch of an infant, Darwin observed that the infant's eyes became fixed and the movement of his arms ceased when he saw a brightly colored tassel. This observation antedates energetic and technological studies of attention in the infant by approximately 70 years. Neither for that matter is the general study of attention an innovation. William James (1890) devoted much energy to exploring the various properties of attention, and perhaps nowhere else can one find as lucid an exposition of the subject as in his Princip~es of Psychology_ \ .

Discrimination of auditory target dimensions in the presence or absence of variation in a second dimension by infants

“…First, the well-known studies of categorical perception have compared the infant's tendencies to discriminate between stimuli drawn from an acoustic continuum with discrimination performance of adult listeners. The classic finding is that infants discriminate stimuli that straddle the adult-defined "boundary" between two phonetic categories better than they discriminate two stimuli that represent the same physical difference but fall into a single phonetic category (Eimas, 1974(Eimas, , 1975Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971), thus replicating the discrimination data obtained with adult listeners (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967). This result has been taken as evidence that infants tend to perceptually group the sounds on either side of a phonetic boundary and that they are Copyright 1982 Psychonomic Society, Inc. 279 0031-5117/82/030279-14$01.65/0 predisposed to hear a discontinuity at the location of the phonetic boundary.…”

“…There are several models of habituation that have been proposed by investigators studying visual perception (Cohen, 1973;Fagan, 1977;Lewis, 1971;McCall, 1971;McCall & McGhee, 1977;Olson, 1976;Sokolov, 1963Sokolov, , 1969. While they differ in some significant respects, each model assumes that in order to demonstrate habituation, the infant must store a composite description of (Le., "remember") the original stimulus and eventually recognize that the stimulus being presented matches the stored representation.…”

Research on Developmental Psychology

“…Lewis's interests in development also extended to the study of infants' and children's cognitive development, including attentional processes, intelligence, and language development (Dodd and Lewis 1969;Freedle and Lewis 1977;Hale and Lewis 1979;Lewis 1971bLewis , 1973Lewis , 1975bLewis , 1976aLewis , b, 1977aLewis , 1978aLewis , 1981aLewis , 1982aLewis and Baldini 1979;Lewis and Cherry 1977;Lewis and Freedle 1977;Lewis and Rosenblum 1977;Lewis et al 1969aLewis et al , 1971McGurk and Lewis 1974).…”

“…These included (a) a reconsideration of attachment theory and (b) the infant as part of a social network . He also began work on a theory of emotional development (Lewis 1971b;Lewis and Michalson 1983).…”

Attentional Habituation and Mental Retardation

“…Lewis [1971] sug gested that '... it may be possible to explore the mental structure of the organism by determi ning stimulus salience hierarchies. Moreover, by observation of the change in those hier archies, a developmental course in these saliencies may be determined ' [pp.…”