Stability of coupled fluctuations in movement and visual attention in infants

Abstract

Fluctuations in body movement and visual inspection were measured over minutes in 3-month-old infants to look for evidence of coupling. In Experiment 1, infants (n 12) looked ad libitum at two identical pictures for an average of 7.3 min. Analysis of the spontaneous¯uctuations in movement and inspection revealed that they were inversely coupled: Moment-to-moment changes in movement and inspection occurred in opposite directions. In Experiment 2, after 4 min of free looking, infants (n 33) were presented with a new pair of stimuli, a temporary change in the stimuli, or no change in stimuli. The inverse coupling between the¯uctuations in body movement and visual inspection found in Experiment 1 was present before and after the stimulus changes, even in infants whose body movement decreased transiently in response to the stimulus changes. The reappearance of inversely coupled¯uctuations in body movement and visual inspection following the stimulus changes was led by increases in movement. The results demonstrate the stability of the inverse coupling between spontaneous¯uctuations in body movement and visual inspection, and suggest that changes in movement may lead changes in inspection. ß

Sensitivity of the rate of spontaneous eye blinking to type of stimuli in young infants

“…LabVIEW v.7.1 software (National Instruments, Austin, TX) was used to integrate body movement measures to 10 Hz and conduct movement analyses. Similar procedures are reported in Bacher and Robertson (2001).…”

“…The infants exhibited orienting responses to both kinds of stimuli as expected: number of eye movements decreased, body movement decreased, and heart rate slowed (Bacher & Robertson, 2001;Malcuit, Pomerleau, & Brosseau, 1988;Richards, 1988). This pattern was apparent in the moving object condition and the social condition, but the magnitude of changes in body movement (and heart rate) was more dramatic in the moving object condition.…”

“…The attention-cardiac coupling is so robust that cardiac changes have been used to describe states or levels of attentional engagement (Lansink & Richards, 1997;Richards, 1985). Robust temporal relationships between attention and body movement (Bacher & Robertson, 2001;Roberston, Johnson, Masnick, & Weiss, 2007) and body movement and cardiac activity have been also demonstrated (Byrne & Miller, 1988).Despite substantial progress in understanding the mechanisms of SB in adults, the respective roles for central and peripheral mechanisms are not clearly understood for infants. In fact, few studies of infants have examined the possible contribution of central factors in regulating SB rate.…”

Does visual information influence infants’ movement to music?

“…Results revealed that, like the presence of visual information, directed attention also interferes with infants’ movement; infants moved more when they did not direct attention toward the monitor (no attention, M = 2.00, SD = .19; attention, M = 1.79, SD = .30; t (45) = 5.84, p (two-tailed) < .001). This result is consistent with those obtained by Bacher and Robertson (2001), who found that visual attention and movement were inversely related in three-month-old infants.…”

Factors Regulating Eye Blink Rate in Young Infants

“…The first two minutes was sufficient to analyze the typical rate of changes in gaze for infants given that many such movements may be sampled during that period of time. Also, although patterns of attention fluctuate over time and transient patterns occur in new environments 35, a two min period of observation in a stable environment extends well beyond the period of these fluctuations. A time sampling approach was used to estimate the frequency of gaze shifts.…”