Cortical Mechanisms Of Visual Attention In Typically Developing Infants And Adults

Research on the development of human infants has revealed remarkable capacities in recent years. Instead of stressing the limitations of the newborn, the modern approach is now more optimistically based on an assessment of the adaptive capabilities of the infant. Innate endowment, coupled with interaction with the physical and social environment, enables a developmental transition from processes deeply rooted in early perception and action to the cognitive and language abilities typical of the toddler.; This book reviews a number of issues in early human development. It includes a reconceptualization of the role of perception at the origins of development, a reconciliation of psychophysical and ecological approaches to early face perception, and building bridges between biological and psychological aspects of development in terms of brain structure and function. Topics covered include basic exploratory processes of early visual systems in early perception and action; face perception in newborns, species typical aspects of human communication, imitation, perception of the phonetic structure of speech, origins of the pointing gesture, handedness origins and development, theoretical contributions on perception and cognition, implicit and explicit knowledge in babies; sensory-motor coordination and cognition, information processing and cognition, perception, habituation and the development of intelligence from infancy.

This volume describes research and theory concerning the cognitive neuroscience of attention. Filling a key gap, it emphasizes developmental changes that occur in the brain-attention relationship in infants, children, and throughout the lifespan and reviews the literature on attention, development, and underlying neural systems in a comprehensive manner. Special features include: * a new model of the neural control of eye movements; * a developmental perspective on the burgeoning literature on the cognitive neuroscience of attention; * the integration of ideas, research, and theories across chapters within each section via summary and commentary essays; and * a summary of the most recent work in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of attention by several of the leading researchers in this field.

1. Introduction. 2. Constructs and Measures. 3. Looking and Visual Attention: Overview and Developmental Framework. 4. Scanning, Searching, and Shifting Attention. 5. Development of Selectivity. 6. Development of Attention as a State. 7. Focused Visual Attention and Resistance to Distraction. 8. Increasing Independence in the Control of Attention. 9. Attention in Learning and Performance. 10. Individual Differences in Attention. 11. Early Manifestations of Attention Deficits. 12. Individuality and Development. 13. Recapitulation. References. Author Index. Subject Index

Paying attention is something we are all familiar with and often take for granted, yet the nature of the operations involved in paying attention is one of the most profound mysteries of the brain. This book contains a rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles by some of the pioneers of contemporary research on attention. Central themes include how attention is moved within the visual field; attention's role during visual search, and the inhibition of these search processes; how attentional processing changes as continued practice leads to automatic performance; how visual and auditory attentional processing may be linked; and recent advances in functional neuro-imaging and how they have been used to study the brain's attentional network

The Neural Theory of Visual Attention of Bundesen, Habekost, and Kyllingsbæk (2005) was proposed as a neural interpretation of Bundesen’s (1990) theory of visual attention (TVA). In NTVA, visual attention functions via two mechanisms: by dynamic remapping of receptive fields of cortical cells such that more cells are devoted to behaviorally important objects than to less important ones (filtering) and by multiplicative scaling of the level of activation in cells coding for particular features (pigeonholing). NTVA accounts for a wide range of known attentional effects in human performance and a wide range of effects observed in firing rates of single cells in the primate visual system and thus provides a mathematical framework to unify the 2 fields of research. In this Research Topic of Frontiers in Psychology, some of the leading theories of visual attention at both the cognitive, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological levels are presented and evaluated. In addition, the Research Topic encompasses application of the framework of NTVA to various patient populations and to neuroimaging as well as genetic and psychopharmacological studies.

social neuroscience, social psychology, developmental, psychology, social cognition, vision research and clinical psychology. social neuroscience, social psychology, developmental, psychology, sThis comprehensive volume reviews current developments in our evolving knowledge of social attention and its processes. In doing so, it examines the brain-behavioral bases of social attention from diverse complementary fields, including disordered and healthy adult findings, infant and developmental studies and social neuroscience. The studies explored in this volume reflect the ongoing shift toward naturalistic, context-based experiments and integrative scientific approaches, and away from relying solely on standardized tasks in laboratory settings. In keeping with this proactive perspective, the authors pose critical questions throughout the book to point readers toward the potential next wave of research developments and interventions. Included in the coverage: The development of social attention in human infants. Neural bases for social attention in healthy humans. Social attention, social presence, and the dual function of gaze. Early departures from normative processes of social engagement in infants with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Aberrant social attention and its underlying neural correlates in adults with ASD. The future of social attention research. The Many Faces of Social Attention will interest researchers in social neuroscience, social psychology, developmental psychology, social cognition, visual attention and cognition, and clinical psychology, and inspire new advances in this increasingly important area of study. ocial cognition, vision research and clinical psychology.

This volume presents an up-to-date review of developmental aspects of human attention by leading researchers and theorists. The papers included in the first section consider the ways in which newborns are pretuned to visual, auditory, linguistic, and social features of their environment, as well as how selectivity to these features changes in the first year of life. The following section examines properties of the visual and auditory world that are attention-getting for children. Developmental increases in capacity and strategy are also examined in this section through the study of perception, memory, problem-solving and language. Section III explores several ways in which selective processing can fail in development (e.g. autism, hyperactivity, and psychopathy) while Section IV reports on those aspects of selectivity that are lost (and preserved) in the aging process.