AI Article Synopsis
- The study explored a new visual inhibition task for infants called the Freeze-Frame task, which helps measure their ability to ignore distracting stimuli.
- The task involved 9-month-olds who were trained to focus on a central animated stimulus while minimizing attention to surrounding distractions, with their performance analyzed over time.
- Results indicated that infants' early ability to inhibit distractions predicted their later cognitive performance, making the Freeze-Frame task a potentially valid tool for assessing inhibitory function in young children.
Article Abstract
The current study investigated a new, easily administered, visual inhibition task for infants termed the Freeze-Frame task. In the new task, 9-month-olds were encouraged to inhibit looks to peripheral distractors. This was done by briefly freezing a central animated stimulus when infants looked to the distractors. Half of the trials presented an engaging central stimulus, and the other half presented a repetitive central stimulus. Three measures of inhibitory function were derived from the task and compared with performance on a set of frontal cortex tasks administered at 9 and 24 months of age. As expected, infants' ability to learn to selectively inhibit looks to the distractors at 9 months predicted performance at 24 months. However, performance differences in the two Freeze-Frame trial types early in the experiment also turned out to be an important predictor. The results are discussed in terms of the validity of the Freeze-Frame task as an early measure of different components of inhibitory function.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2007.09.004 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!