The Role of Auditory-Visual Synchrony in Capture of Attention and Induction of Attentional State in Infancy

Abstract

This study was designed to examine the types of events that are most effective in capturing infant attention and whether these attention-getting events also effectively elicit an attentional state and facilitate perception and learning. Despite the frequent use of attention-getters (AGs) - presenting an attention-grabbing event between trials to redirect attention and reduce data loss due to fussiness - relatively little is known about the influence of AGs on attentional state. A recent investigation revealed that the presentation of AGs not only captures attention, but also produces heart rate decelerations during habituation and faster dishabituation in a subsequent task, indicating changes in the state of sustained attention and enhanced stimulus processing (Domsch, Thomas, & Lohaus, 2010). Attention-getters are often multimodal, dynamic, and temporally synchronous; such highly redundant properties generally guide selective attention and are thought to coordinate multisensory information in early development. In the current study, 4-month-old infants were randomly assigned to one of three attention-getter AG conditions: synchronous AG, asynchronous AG, and no AG. Following the AG, infants completed a discrimination task with a partial-lag design, which allowed for the assessment of infants' ability to discriminate between familiar and novel stimuli while controlling for spontaneous recovery. Analyses indicated that the AG condition captured and induced an attentional state, regardless of the presence of temporal synchrony. Although the synchronous and asynchronous AG conditions produced similar patterns of attention in the AG session, during familiarization infants in the asynchronous AG condition showed a pattern of increasing HR across the task and had higher overall HR compared to the synchronous AG and no AG conditions. Implications of the effect of attention-getters and temporal synchrony on infant performance are discussed.