Attentional inertia at four and seven months?
Anderson showed that, for TV watchers as young as 12 months, the probability of maintaining a look increases as the look progresses. Based on this finding, he hypothesized a previously unreported process, "attentional inertia," that he considered the conceptual obverse of habituation. Since the existence of such a process would profoundly affect theories of infant attention, the present research tested for evidence of attentional inertia in babies younger than 12 months. Data from 1 group of 7-month-olds and 3 groups of 4-month-olds who participated in previous studies were reexamined here. The main analysis involved the conditional probability of a look surpassing t sec given that the look had already surpassed t -- 3 sec. The conditional probabilities varied as a function of time similarly for the 4 groups: the first 6 sec but subsequently increased (supposedly evidence of attentional inertia). The increase, however, was attributable to 1 of 2 computational artifacts that were understandable in terms of habituation. Thus, no evidence of attentional inertia was found in these infants.
D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D002666:Psychology, Child; D014796:Visual Perception