The Examination of Endogenous Attention: Stimulus-Cue Learning in 4- and 9-Month-Olds

Abstract

The present study used a stimulus-to-response task to test the presence of endogenous attention in 4- and 9-month-old infants. Infants were presented with a cue stimulus that predicted the location of a peripheral target. If infants had the ability to endogenously guide eye movements, then the learned association between the cue and peripheral target location could be used to facilitate eye movements to the upcoming target location. Although a decrease in anticipation latency was observed, this decrease did not appear to be based systematically on the contingent relationship. This study also examined the effect of enhancing stimulus salience, and found that cue salience can affect the outcome of the stimulus-to-response task for younger infants. Cue salience, however, did not improve infants' performance on the task. This result coupled with an overall lack of contingent based facilitation indicates that infants at neither age showed evidence of endogenous attention.