Infant visual attention: Stability of individual differences from 6 to 8 months.

This study examined the stability of two aspects of infant visual attention derived from the paired-comparison procedure in infants tested at 6, 7, and 8 months: novelty preference and exposure time. Novelty preference, which reflects the relative amount of time the infants look at a new stimulus compared with a familiar stimulus, was found to be moderately stable, with cross-age correlations ranging from .30 to .50 when scores were averaged across six problems. Similar stability coefficients were found for counts of the number of problems for which infants exhibited novelty percentages exceeding an arbitrary criterion. Exposure-time scores, reflecting the time required to accumulate a preset amount of looking at the familiarization stimulus, also showed moderate stability, with cross-age correlations ranging from .32 to .38. These two measures of visual attention did not correlate well with one another and neither was related to contemporaneous measures of infant competence, represented by Bayley (1969) Mental Developmental Index (MDI) and Psychomotor Developmental Index (PDI) scores at 7 months. It was concluded that novelty and exposure-time scores each reflect moderately stable but independent characteristics of infant behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)