Focus: Attention Science: Infant Attention and Age 3 Executive Function

Executive function (EF) abilities refer to higher order cognitive processes necessary to consciously and deliberately persist in a task and are associated with a variety of important developmental outcomes. Attention is believed to support the development and deployment of EF. Although preschool EF and attentional abilities are concurrently linked, much less is known about the longitudinal association between infant attentional abilities and preschool EF. The current study investigated the impact of infant attention orienting behavior on preschool EF. Maternal report and laboratory measures of infant attention were gathered on 114 infants who were 5 months old; performance on four different EF tasks was measured when these same children were 3 years old. Infant attention skills were significantly related to preschool EF, even after controlling for age 3 verbal intelligence. These findings indicate that infant attention may indeed serve as an early marker of later EF. Given the significant developmental outcomes associated with EF, understanding the foundational factors associated with EF is necessary for both theoretical and practical purposes