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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) impacts an individual's ability to socialize, communicate, and interact with, and adapt to, the environment. Over the last two decades, research has focused on early identification of ASD with significant progress being made in understanding the early behavioral and biological markers that precede a diagnosis, providing a catalyst for pre-symptomatic identification and intervention. Evidence from preclinical trials suggest that intervention prior to the onset of ASD symptoms may yield more improved developmental outcomes, and clinical studies suggest that the earlier intervention is administered, the better the outcomes. This article brings together a multidisciplinary group of experts to develop a conceptual framework for behavioral intervention, during the pre-symptomatic period prior to the consolidation of symptoms into diagnosis, in infants at very-high-likelihood for developing ASD (VHL-ASD). The overarching goals of this paper are to promote the development of new intervention approaches, empirical research, and policy efforts aimed at VHL-ASD infants during the pre-symptomatic period (i.e., prior to the consolidation of the defining features of ASD).

Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially in cluttered naturalistic environments, there are an abundance of potential cues that can be used to structure learning into hierarchical rule structures. It is unclear how infants determine what features constitute a higher-order context to organize inputs into hierarchical rule structures. Here, we examine whether 9-month-old infants are biased to use social stimuli, relative to non-social stimuli, as a higher-order context to organize learning of simple visuospatial inputs into hierarchical rule sets. Infants were presented with four face/color-target location pairings, which could be learned most simply as individual associations. Alternatively, infants could use the faces or colorful backgrounds as a higher-order context to organize the inputs into simpler color-location or face-location rules, respectively. Infants were then given a generalization test designed to probe "how" they learned the initial pairings. The results indicated that infants appeared to use the faces as a higher-order context to organize simpler color-location rules, which then supported generalization of learning to new face contexts. These findings provide new evidence that infants are biased to organize reinforcement learning around social stimuli.

Visual attention both guides and is guided by learning and memory systems. In this article, we use a multiple-memory systems framework to examine the interplay between attention and memory that begins in early postnatal life. We review how attention and memory interact to support infant development with respect to perceptual learning about objects and features, item-in-context spatial memory, and reinforcement and reward learning. We argue that the multiple-memory systems approach offers a useful organizational structure for research on interactions between attention and memory.

The use of global, standardized instruments is conventional among clinicians and researchers interested in assessing neurocognitive development. Exclusively relying on these tests for evaluating effects may underestimate or miss specific effects on early cognition. The goal of this review is to identify alternative measures for possible inclusion in future clinical trials and interventions evaluating early neurocognitive development. The domains included for consideration are attention, memory, executive function, language, and socioemotional development. Although domain-based tests are limited, as psychometric properties have not yet been well-established, this review includes tasks and paradigms that have been reliably used across various developmental psychology laboratories.

Rule-guided behavior depends on the ability to strategically update and act on content held in working memory. Proactive and reactive control strategies were contrasted across two experiments using an adapted input/output gating paradigm (Neuron, 81, 2014 and 930). Behavioral accuracies of 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds were higher when a contextual cue appeared at the beginning of the task (input gating) rather than at the end (output gating). This finding supports prior work in older children, suggesting that children are better when input gating but rely on the more effortful output gating strategy for goal-oriented action selection (Cognition, 155, 2016 and 8). A manipulation was added to investigate whether children's use of working memory strategies becomes more flexible when task goals are specified internally rather than externally provided by the experimenter. A shift toward more proactive control was observed when children chose the task goal among two alternatives. Scan path analyses of saccadic eye movement indicated that giving children agency and choice over the task goal resulted in less use of a reactive strategy than when the goal was determined by the experimenter.

Recent research indicates that adults and infants spontaneously create and generalize hierarchical rule sets during incidental learning. Computational models and empirical data suggest that, in adults, this process is supported by circuits linking prefrontal cortex (PFC) with striatum and their modulation by dopamine, but the neural circuits supporting this form of learning in infants are largely unknown. We used near-infrared spectroscopy to record PFC activity in 8-month-old human infants during a simple audiovisual hierarchical-rule-learning task. Behavioral results confirmed that infants adopted hierarchical rule sets to learn and generalize spoken object-label mappings across different speaker contexts. Infants had increased activity over right dorsal lateral PFC when rule sets switched from one trial to the next, a neural marker related to updating rule sets into working memory in the adult literature. Infants' eye blink rate, a possible physiological correlate of striatal dopamine activity, also increased when rule sets switched from one trial to the next. Moreover, the increase in right dorsolateral PFC activity in conjunction with eye blink rate also predicted infants' generalization ability, providing exploratory evidence for frontostriatal involvement during learning. These findings provide evidence that PFC is involved in rudimentary hierarchical rule learning in 8-month-old infants, an ability that was previously thought to emerge later in life in concert with PFC maturation.Significance statementHierarchical rule learning is a powerful learning mechanism that allows rules to be selected in a context-appropriate fashion and transferred or reused in novel contexts. Data from computational models and adults suggests that this learning mechanism is supported by dopamine-innervated interactions between prefrontal cortex (PFC) and striatum. Here, we provide evidence that PFC also supports hierarchical rule learning during infancy, challenging the current dogma that PFC is an underdeveloped brain system until adolescence. These results add new insights into the neurobiological mechanisms available to support learning and generalization in very early postnatal life, providing evidence that PFC and the frontostriatal circuitry are involved in organizing learning and behavior earlier in life than previously known.

During the first year of life, infants maintain their ability to discriminate faces from their own race but become less able to differentiate other-race faces. Though this is likely due to daily experience with own-race faces, the mechanisms linking repeated exposure to optimal face processing remain unclear. One possibility is that frequent experience with own-race faces generates a selective attention bias to these faces. Selective attention elicits enhancement of attended information and suppression of distraction to improve visual processing of attended objects. Thus attention biases to own-race faces may boost processing and discrimination of these faces relative to other-race faces. We used a spatial cueing task to bias attention to own- or other-race faces among Caucasian 9-month-old infants. Infants discriminated faces in the focus of the attention bias, regardless of race, indicating that infants remained sensitive to differences among other-race faces. Instead, efficacy of face discrimination reflected the extent of attention engagement.

The visual context in which an object or face resides can provide useful top-down information for guiding attention orienting, object recognition, and visual search. Although infants have demonstrated sensitivity to covariation in spatial arrays, it is presently unclear whether they can use rapidly acquired contextual knowledge to guide attention during visual search. In this eye-tracking experiment, 6- and 10-month-old infants searched for a target face hidden among colorful distracter shapes. Targets appeared in "Old" or "New" visual contexts, depending on whether the visual search arrays (defined by the spatial configuration, shape and color of component items in the search display) were repeated or newly generated throughout the experiment. Targets in "Old" contexts appeared in the same location within the same configuration, such that context covaried with target location. Both 6- and 10-month-olds successfully distinguished between "Old" and "New" contexts, exhibiting faster search times, fewer looks at distracters, and more anticipation of targets when contexts repeated. This initial demonstration of contextual cueing effects in infants indicates that they can use top-down information to facilitate orienting during memory-guided visual search.

Understanding executive functions (EFs) development is of high value to global developmental science. Recent calls for a more inclusive and equitable developmental science argue that tasks and questionnaires that are developed using only a subset of the population are not likely to be appropriate for EFs measurement in global contexts unless explicitly tested . Here, we examined a task commonly used to assess EFs in Western populations in a non-Western sample of Jordanian children. We used the Hearts and Flowers (HF) task to examine (a) its value for assessing EFs development in Jordanian children, and (b) whether task performance was associated with socioeconomic variables and parent report of academic achievement, internalizing, and externalizing behaviors measured with the Arabic Child Behavior Checklist. We report data from N = 93 5.5-8.5 year-old Jordanian children. We found the task to be valuable for distinguishing performance among EFs constructs (working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility) in this cohort. However, there were no age differences in EFs performance, nor any EFs-specific relationship to any of the parentreport measures of EFs-related constructs. Instead, EFs were related to paternal education and location of residence (Jordanian governorate). We discuss these findings in the context of the expansion of developmental science into global contexts and call for special consideration of measurement and generalizability biases in investigations with human subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children (N = 103, 4–9 years, 59 females, 84% White, c. 2019) completed visual processing, visual feature integration (color, luminance, motion), and visual search tasks. Contrast sensitivity and feature search improved with age similarly for luminance and color‐defined targets. Incidental feature integration improved more with age for color‐motion than luminance‐motion. Individual differences in feature search (β =.11) and incidental feature integration (β =.06) mediated age‐related changes in conjunction visual search, an index of visual selective attention. These findings suggest that visual selective attention is best conceptualized as a series of developmental trajectories, within an individual, that vary by an object's defining features. These data have implications for design of educational and interventional strategies intended to maximize attention for learning and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether infants are sensitive to backward and forward transitional probabilities within temporal and spatial visual streams. Two groups of 8-month-old infants were familiarized with an artificial grammar of shapes, comprising backward and forward base pairs (i.e. two shapes linked by strong backward or forward transitional probability) and part-pairs (i.e. two shapes with weak transitional probabilities in both directions). One group viewed the continuous visual stream as a temporal sequence, while the other group viewed the same stream as a spatial array. Following familiarization, infants looked longer at test trials containing part-pairs than base pairs, although they had appeared with equal frequency during familiarization. This pattern of looking time was evident for both forward and backward pairs, in both the temporal and spatial conditions. Further, differences in looking time to part-pairs that were consistent or inconsistent with the predictive direction of the base pairs (forward or backward) indicated that infants were indeed sensitive to direction when presented with temporal sequences, but not when presented with spatial arrays. These results suggest that visual statistical learning is flexible in infancy and depends on the nature of visual input.

Previous work has demonstrated that social attention is related to early language abilities. We explored whether we can facilitate word learning among children with autism by directing attention to areas of the scene that have been demonstrated as relevant for successful word learning. We tracked eye movements to faces and objects while children watched videos of a woman teaching them new words. Test trials measured participants' recognition of these novel word-object pairings. Results indicate that for children with autism and typically developing children, pointing to the speaker's mouth while labeling a novel object impaired performance, likely because it distracted participants from the target object. In contrast, for children with autism, holding the object close to the speaker's mouth improved performance.

We examined the impact of simultaneous bottom-up visual influences and meaningful social stimuli on attention orienting in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Relative to typically-developing age and sex matched participants, children with ASDs were more influenced by bottom-up visual scene information regardless of whether social stimuli and bottom-up scene properties were congruent or competing. This initial reliance on bottom-up strategies correlated with severity of social impairment as well as receptive language impairments. These data provide support for the idea that there is enhanced reliance on bottom-up attention strategies in ASDs, and that this may have a negative impact on social and language development.

The present study examined the hypothesis that inhibitory visual selection mechanisms play a vital role in memory by limiting distractor interference during item encoding. In Experiment 1a we used a modified spatial cueing task in which 9-month-old infants encoded multiple category exemplars in the contexts of an attention orienting mechanism involving suppression (i.e. inhibition of return, IOR) versus one that does not (i.e. facilitation). At test, infants in the IOR condition showed both item-specific learning and abstraction of broader category information. In contrast, infants in the facilitation condition did not discriminate across novel and familiar test items. Experiment 1b confirmed that the learning observed in the IOR condition was specific to spatial cueing of attention and was not due to timing differences across the IOR and facilitation conditions. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results of Experiment 1, using a within-subjects design to explicitly examine learning and memory encoding in the context of concurrent suppression. These data show that developing inhibitory selective attention enhances efficacy of memory encoding for subsequent retrieval. Furthermore, these results highlight the importance of considering interactions between developing attention and memory systems.

We recently proposed a multi-channel, image-filtering model for simulating the development of visual selective attention in young infants (Schlesinger, Amso & Johnson, 2007). The model not only captures the performance of 3-month-olds on a visual search task, but also implicates two cortical regions that may play a role in the development of visual selective attention. In the current simulation study, we used the same model to simulate 3-month-olds' performance on a second measure, the perceptual unity task. Two parameters in the model--corresponding to areas in the occipital and parietal cortices--were systematically varied while the gaze patterns produced by the model were recorded and subsequently analyzed. Three key findings emerged from the simulation study. First, the model successfully replicated the performance of 3-month-olds on the unity perception task. Second, the model also helps to explain the improved performance of 2-month-olds when the size of the occluder in the unity perception task is reduced. Third, in contrast to our previous simulation results, variation in only one of the two cortical regions simulated (i.e. recurrent activity in posterior parietal cortex) resulted in a performance pattern that matched 3-month-olds. These findings provide additional support for our hypothesis that the development of perceptual completion in early infancy is promoted by progressive improvements in visual selective attention and oculomotor skill. (Contains 7 figures.)

We examined changes in the efficiency of visual selection over the first postnatal year with an adapted version of a "spatial negative priming" paradigm. In this task, when a previously ignored location becomes the target to be selected, responses to it are impaired, providing a measure of visual selection. Oculomotor latencies to target selection were the dependent measure. Each trial consisted of a "prime" and a "probe" presentation, separated by a 67-, 200-, or 550-msec interstimulus interval (ISI), to test the efficiency of selection as a function of processing time. In the prime, the target was accompanied by a distractor item. In the probe, the target appeared either in the location formerly occupied by the distractor ("repeated distractor" trials) or in one of the other two locations ("control" trials). We tested 41 infants in each of 3 age groups (3, 6, and 9 months) on the three different ISIs. Nine-month-old infants' saccade latencies were slowed on repeated distractors relative to control trials, given sufficiently long ISIs. Saccade latencies in the youngest two age groups showed only facilitation on repeated distractor trials at short ISIs. These results suggest that visual selection efficiency is a function of the interaction of the processing limitations of a system with environmental conditions, in this case the time allotted for the selection process. (Contains 4 figures.)

The authors examined how visual selection mechanisms may relate to developing cognitive functions in infancy. Twenty-two 3-month-old infants were tested in 2 tasks on the same day: perceptual completion and visual search. In the perceptual completion task, infants were habituated to a partly occluded moving rod and subsequently presented with unoccluded broken and complete rod test stimuli. In the visual search task, infants viewed displays in which single targets of varying levels of salience were cast among homogeneous static vertical distractors. Infants whose posthabituation preference indicated unity perception in the completion task provided evidence of a functional visual selective attention mechanism in the search task. The authors discuss the implications of the efficiency of attentional mechanisms for information processing and learning.

A fundamental question of perceptual development concerns how infants come to perceive partly hidden objects as unified across a spatial gap imposed by an occluder. Much is known about the time course of development of perceptual completion during the first several months after birth, as well as some of the visual information that supports unity perception in infants. The goal of this investigation was to examine the inputs to this process. We recorded eye movements in 3-month-old infants as they participated in a standard object unity task and found systematic differences in scanning patterns between those infants whose post-habituation preferences were indicative of unity perception versus those infants who did not perceive unity. Perceivers, relative to nonperceivers, scanned more reliably in the vicinity of the visible rod parts and scanned more frequently across the range of rod motion. These results suggest that emerging object concepts are tied closely to available visual information in the environment, and the process of information pickup. (Contains 8 figures.)

Systematically varied the day-night task requiring children to say "night" to a sun picture and "day" to a moon picture to investigate why young children typically fail the task. Found that reducing memory load did not help performance. Reducing inhibitory demand by requiring an unrelated response or inserting a delay between stimulus and response helped performance. (Author/KB)

We build on the existing biased competition view to argue that attention is an emergent property of neural computations within and across hierarchically embedded and structurally connected cortical pathways. Critically then, one must ask, what is attention emergent from? Within this framework, developmental changes in the quality of sensory input and feedforward‐feedback information flow shape the emergence and efficiency of attention. Several gradients of developing structural and functional cortical architecture across the caudal‐to‐rostral axis provide the substrate for attention to emerge. Neural activity within visual areas depends on neuronal density, receptive field size, tuning properties of neurons, and the location of and competition between features and objects in the visual field. These visual cortical properties highlight the information processing bottleneck attention needs to resolve. Recurrent feedforward and feedback connections convey sensory information through a series of steps at each level of the cortical hierarchy, integrating sensory information across the entire extent of the cortical hierarchy and linking sensory processing to higher‐order brain regions. Higher‐order regions concurrently provide input conveying behavioral context and goals. Thus, attention reflects the output of a series of complex biased competition neural computations that occur within and across hierarchically embedded cortical regions. Cortical development proceeds along the caudal‐to‐rostral axis, mirroring the flow in sensory information from caudal to rostral regions, and visual processing continues to develop into childhood. Examining both typical and atypical development will offer critical mechanistic insight not otherwise available in the adult stable state. This article is categorized under:Psychology > Attention [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]