Chunk #3 — 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 volitional and goal-directed use of attention develops gradually across the second year of life, and may serve as a foundation from which higher-level cognitive skills are built (Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008; Posner & Rothbart, 2007). Although rudimentary components of attentional control are observable by the end of the first year, it is not until much later that infants reliably demonstrate the capacity for internally directed attention. For examples, infants as young as 7-months have been observed to look longer at events that violated their expectations of numeracy (Berger, Tsur, & Posner, 2006), and by 12 months, most infants perform above chance on Piaget’s (1954) classic A-not-B task (Diamond, 1991). That infants this young are capable of detecting errors and monitoring conflict between response tendencies suggests that a supervisory attention system is already in place by the end of 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;
