Playing for Attention: How Babies Learn to Focus

Eight-month-old Joseph sits in a high chair, his tray filled with toys. He reaches for one and looks over at his mother beside him who is smiling and talking softly. He turns back to his toys, unfazed by the camera pointed at him or the researcher sitting behind him.

Joseph is too young to realize this seemingly normal afternoon spent playing with his mother is helping researchers understand how babies pay attention, how they learn and how their relationships shape that process. The information, gleaned from small moments like this, could help children and their caregivers around the world. What researchers learn could influence how caregivers, clinicians and educators support children during one of the fastest periods of brain development in their lives.

Joseph and his mother are part of a study being conducted by the Learning and Brain Development Lab at Tulane University, led by Julie Markant, associate professor of psychology in the School of Science and Engineering. The study, funded by a $1.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, examines how caregivers affect an infant’s ability to focus and control their attention during the first year of life.

The research could help explain fundamental science about how brains work from the very beginning. By understanding how attention develops at its earliest stages, researchers can better explain how more complex skills — like learning, emotional regulation and social interaction — emerge over time.

They can also obtain insights into how best to care for infants and give them the best start in life. Once there is a baseline of research examining these processes in typical development, researchers can also study atypical development, such as autism spectrum disorder. Without a clear picture of typical development, it is difficult to identify early signs or design effective early interventions for atypical development.

Paying attention

“We’re especially interested in the development of attention control, which is basically how we can focus attention on information that’s relevant ... and ignore distracting or irrelevant information,” said Markant, who is also a faculty associate with the Tulane Brain Institute. This control, which develops in the first year of life, is crucial for more advanced cognitive skills.

One way researchers study attention control is by examining attention biases, the natural tendency to pay attention to some things more than others, like the instinctive urge to look in the direction of a loud noise.

It might seem like common sense that babies would have such biases toward their caregivers, the people who feed them, protect them and play with them most of the time. But just because something seems intuitive does not necessarily mean that it is true. Scientists don’t fully understand how these biases form or why they vary among children. The differences among children may help explain why children raised in similar environments can have different developmental paths.

That is where Markant and her team come in.

They are looking at two main things: how to describe the development of attention biases toward caregivers and what in a baby’s environment or other skills could predict individual differences in these attention biases.

“The main goal of this study is really to set a baseline for what typical attention development will look like throughout infancy,” said Shanae Venter, a senior studying neuroscience and a research assistant in Markant’s lab. That baseline gives researchers a reference point for identifying when development may begin to diverge and why.

This research is part of an ongoing shift in psychology away from separately studying social-emotional and cognitive development. Social-emotional development refers to how we learn to relate to other people, practice social skills and express emotions. Cognitive development, on the other hand, refers to how we learn to reason, think and understand. For a long time, psychologists have generally studied these areas in isolation without examining how one might affect the other, especially in the early stages of life. However, more recent research has shown that they impact each other throughout our lives.

“In developmental science, there’s a lot of interest right now in how the dynamics of everyday interactions drive [cognitive] development,” Markant said. Those everyday moments — eye contact, shared attention and responsive caregiving — can have lasting effects on how the brain organizes itself.

Markant has been interested in how babies learn since she was an undergraduate student working as a research assistant and studied how infants perceive the world around them. Much like her own undergraduate researchers, Markant worked with eye-tracking technology and was fascinated by how engaged the infants were.

“They’re really active participants in what they’re learning, they have a lot of agency, and even though they can barely hold their bodies, their eyes are a gateway into their experience with the world,” said Markant.

Changes over time

Joseph and his mother are part of a longitudinal study, meaning researchers observe babies multiple times, at four, six and eight months, to see how their behavior changes. This is Joseph’s last visit. As a thank you, Brooke Montgomery, a PhD student in Markant’s lab, presents him with a gift: a blue T-shirt with the lab’s pelican logo.

In the first eight months of life, babies like Joseph take in the bright, busy world they now inhabit, learn to recognize faces and master milestones like rolling and crawling. Each visit provides a snapshot of the growth and development of that child. “You can really tell a difference, how they change and how they interact with strangers, how they interact with their mom,” said Emma Crawford, a junior studying neuroscience with a minor in Spanish. “They get a little bit more endurance toward six and eight months.”

All of the tasks that Joseph and his mother are doing address a challenge Markant’s lab faces: Unlike older children or adults, infants can’t take direction or tell researchers what they are thinking or feeling.

“We obviously have to be pretty creative with babies,” said Markant. “We can’t just ask them questions.”

How do you react?

When Joseph chooses a toy to play with, when his mom faces him and talks to him, when he watches a video on a tablet, researchers monitor his heart rate, looking to see how it changes. These physiological responses offer clues about how infants process information and regulate attention in real time.

Researchers also monitor how the infants react during the still-face task, which caregivers tend to find difficult. During this activity, they must maintain a neutral expression and refrain from interacting with their child for two minutes. This is a common task in psychological studies with infants to assess the quality of infant-caregiver interactions by examining how a baby reacts when their caregiver does not react to them. Babies’ responses during this brief disruption can reveal early patterns of emotional regulation and attachment.

Joseph and his mother did the test at their four-month visit.

“After four months of interacting with your baby, you have these very natural, reciprocal interactions,” said Markant. “So, we’re asking them not to do what feels natural for them.”

The results of this task stay consistent over the first year.

Where are you looking?

For one activity, Joseph’s mother fastens him in a high chair in front of a screen. Markant and her team use eye-tracking technology to study how quickly Joseph will turn his attention to a photo of his mother’s face when presented with multiple images, including one of a stranger’s face. How quickly babies orient to familiar versus unfamiliar faces may help researchers understand how social experiences guide attention early in life.

A sticker with black concentric circles between Joseph’s eyebrows helps calibrate a camera that tracks where Joseph is looking and for how long.

Another test uses eye-tracking to gauge Joseph’s selective attention, or how well he pays attention amid other distractions. Researchers are looking at whether these developing attention skills predict anything about the attention biases that are the main subject of the study.

While Joseph plays with the research assistants, his mom answers questions about her own well-being and how many people Joseph interacts with regularly. Markant wants to know more about Joseph’s socialization, because how many new faces he regularly sees likely impacts how he chooses to pay attention to strangers’ faces.

Markant’s team is also reviewing the questionnaires to identify how they should further study how caregiver well-being, including depression, relates to infant attachment. Plans for that study won’t be made until they have a baseline of typical attention biases from the current study. 

Families

The research wouldn’t be possible without the trust and support of the families who participate. The team needs more than 100 participants to attend all three visits to complete this study.

“We’re asking so much of [the families who participate],” said Venter. “Part of caring for them is meeting them where they’re at.”

The team provides a small monetary incentive to families who participate and, when needed, can provide transportation to and from visits. Siblings who tag along are made comfortable with toys and snacks.

“We have many families who, over the years, have had a second child and they’ve come in again,” said Markant. “We have families who are quite supportive of what we’re doing.”

Markant’s team recruits families and expecting parents at the Louisiana Children’s Museum, farmers markets and other outreach events.   

“I love going to those events and telling people more about it, because I don’t think a lot of people know that they can just get involved with research at an institution like this,” said Crawford.

Part of the team’s outreach includes sharing findings, even preliminary ones, with the community in newsletters and on social media.

“They deserve to know what we found, and they deserve to be informed in a way that’s understandable,” Markant said.   

Although the team is nearly done with this phase of the study, they still need to process and analyze the data they have gathered before it can be published in a journal.

As Joseph’s mother packs him in his stroller and heads home, he becomes one of the many babies whose small moments of play could provide a key to how humans connect and how these earliest relationships could impact the way we think.