Chunk #4 — Changes in Frontal EEG Coherence across Infancy Predict Cognitive Abilities at Age 3: The Mediating Role of Attentional Control — The Development of Attentional Control
the first year. However, correct anticipation of ambiguous visual sequences, a process that involves endogenous (versus exogenous) deployment of attention, has not been observed in infants younger than 18-months (Clohessy, Posner, & Rothbart, 2001; Rothbart, Ellis, Rueda, & Posner, 2003; Sheese, Rothbart, Posner, White, & Fraundorf, 2008), and the capacity to successfully resolve conflict, a process that requires the use of internally-directed attention (to choose between competing response tendencies), has not been reliably observed until the middle of the third year (Gerardi-Caulton, 2000; Rothbart et al., 2003). Sustained and selective attention, other indicators of attentional control, can be assessed in young children using single feature visual search paradigms, which require them to search for a target item amidst an array of other items. Although only a few studies have used these paradigms with toddlers, results suggest that overall search accuracy at this age is highly variable and positively correlated with other indicators of attention and memory (Mulder, Hoofs, Verhagen, van der Veen, & Leseman, 2014). Visual search accuracy by the end of the second year may be an informative measure of children’s capacity to deploy their attention in a goal-directed fashion.
