María Rosario Rueda

Attention regulation refers to the ability to control attention according to goals and intentions. Disengagement of attention is one of the first mechanisms of attention regulation that emerges in infancy, involving attention control and flexibility. Disengaging attention from emotional stimuli (such as threat-related cues) is of particular interest given its implication for self- regulation. A second mechanism of attention control is the ability to flexibly switch attention according to changing conditions. In our study, we investigated 9 to 12-month-olds' disengagement and flexibility of attention, and examined the contribution of both temperament and socioeconomic status (SES) to individual differences in the emergence of these attention regulation skills at the end of the first year of life. Our results show that both difficulty to disengage from fearful faces and poorer attention flexibility were associated with higher levels of temperamental Negative Affectivity (NA). Additionally, attention flexibility moderated the effect of NA on disengagement from fearful faces. Infants with higher NA and poorer attention flexibility showed the greatest difficulty to disengage. Low SES was also associated with poorer attention flexibility, association that was mediated by infants' NA. These results suggest that attention flexibility together with temperament and environmental factors are key to understand individual differences in attention regulation from threat-related stimuli as early as from infancy. Our findings also stress the importance of interactions between environmental and constitutional factors for understanding individual differences in the emergence of attention regulation.

The development of attention serves the child with mechanisms that allow an increased voluntary control of behavior and is tightly linked to self-regulation. Different facets of attention show major developmental changes during the first years of life, followed by a protracted developmental period in childhood and beyond. Evidence from cognitive neuroscience studies has helped to elucidate the neural networks and their operation underlying attention development, as well as genetic and environmental factors that contribute to individual differences in efficiency. Also, an increasing number of studies show that the executive control of attention can be enhanced by training, leading to benefits at both the cognitive and brain levels. This chapter relates changes in the ability of infants and young children to control attention and behavior to underlying brain function and connectivity, the factors that contribute to individual differences, and the type of experiences that may promote children's self-regulation skills.

Error detection is one of the functions of the executive attention network, a brain system involved in executive control that includes the anterior cingulate cortex and other prefrontal regions. Despite the key role of this function in a wide range of life outcomes, very limited research has examined the early development of the network and whether its functional efficacy is related to environmental factors. Electrophysiological studies with adults have shown oscillatory activity in theta (4-7 Hz) range arising from medial frontal cortex that follows the detection of self-committed or observed errors. In the current study, we designed a novel experimental procedure that involved a familiarization phase with simple three-pieces puzzles followed by an experimental phase in which toddlers observed the puzzles being formed either correctly or incorrectly. Observation of incorrect configurations produced increased potentials in midline channels and greater power theta activity for both toddlers (n=56) and adults (n=14). Additionally, socio-economic status of the family in general, and parental education in particular, contributed to individual differences in the amplitude of the error-related signal and associated theta power in toddlers, indicating that children raised in lower SES families show poorer activation of the executive attention network. These data demonstrate the influence of environmental factors at the earliest stages of development of the executive attention network. Importantly, results show that error-detection EEG signals can be used as neural markers of the initial development of executive attention, which could be of great help for the early detection of risk for developmental disorders involving deficits in this function.

Executive control (EC) emerges in the first year of life, with the ability to inhibit prepotent responses (inhibitory control [IC]) and to flexibly readapt (cognitive flexibility [CF]) steadily improving. Simultaneously, electrophysiological brain activity undergoes profound reconfiguration, which has been linked to individual variability in EC. However, most studies exploring this relationship have used relative/absolute power and tasks that combine different executive processes. In addition, brain activity conflates aperiodic and oscillatory activity, which hinders the interpretation of the relationship between power and cognition. In the current study, we used the Early Childhood Inhibitory Touchscreen Task (ECITT) to examine the development of EC skills from 9 to 16 months in a longitudinal sample, and related performance of the task to resting‐state EEG (rs‐EEG) power, separating oscillatory and aperiodic activity. Our results showed improvement in IC but not in CF with age. In addition, alpha and theta oscillatory activity were concurrent (9‐mo.) and longitudinal predictors of CF in toddlerhood, whereas the aperiodic exponent of the EEG signal did not contribute to EC. These findings demonstrate the relevance of oscillatory brain activity for cognitive development and provide an early brain marker for the early development of EC.

Attention is a fundamental cognitive mechanism whose primary function is to regulate and organize the flow of perceptions and actions shaping our mental life. Early cognitive models have highlighted aspects of sustained, selective, and executive control as essential components of attention. These three broad aspects can be further subdivided into subordinate operations, depending on whether the particular function is mostly driven by external stimulation (bottom-up attention) or relies on endogenous processes such as voluntary intentions or expectations (top-down attention). After several decades of cognitive neuroscience research, these different functions have been associated with specific circuits of brain regions. Based on the cognitive neuroscience framework, this paper presents a theory of attention development and discusses behavioral and brain evidence regarding the development of attention function during the first years of life.

This paper investigates the interplay between environmental factors (socioeconomic status (SES) and parenting) and temperament in the development of inhibitory control (IC) at 2 years of age. We administered to toddlers (n = 59) a delay of gratification task which measures IC in the context of self-regulation. Parents reported their toddlers’ temperament, parenting strategies, and SES. We hypothesized that poorer IC would be associated with more reactive temperament, less effortful control, lower SES and inconsistent/coercive parenting practices. Finally, we explored the interaction between temperament, parenting and SES. We found that both coercive parenting and low-SES were negatively correlated to IC at the age of 2 years. Temperamental reactivity was unrelated to IC, whereas temperamental effortful control (EC) was positively associated with IC. Results revealed a moderation effect of EC on the influence of coercive parenting and SES in toddlers’ IC. Toddlers from lower SES backgrounds and with lower EC were more affected by inconsistent/coercive parenting practices and showed the poorest IC. In contrast, toddlers exhibiting high and average levels of EC seemed to be protected from the detrimental effect of low-SES and inconsistent/coercive parenting on IC. These results suggest that strengthening toddlers’ EC and improving parents’ parenting skills might be especially relevant for the development of IC in the context of self-regulation, particularly by preventing self-regulatory problems in children from socioeconomically deprived environments. Future studies with larger samples, focusing on populations from severe socioeconomically deprived environments, or intervention studies will be needed in order to confirm and expand our findings.

Brain function rapidly changes in the first 2 years of life. In the last decades, resting‐state EEG has been widely used to explore those changes. Previous studies have focused on the relative power of the signal in established frequency bands (i.e., theta, alpha, and beta). However, EEG power is a mixture of a 1/f‐like background power (aperiodic) in combination with narrow peaks that appear over that curve (periodic activity, e.g., alpha peak). Therefore, it is possible that relative power captures both, aperiodic and periodic brain activity, contributing to changes in electrophysiological activity observed in infancy. For this reason, we explored the early developmental trajectory of the relative power in theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands from infancy to toddlerhood and compared it with changes in periodic activity in a longitudinal study with three waves at age 6, 9, and 16 to 18 months. Finally, we tested the contribution of periodic activity and aperiodic components of the EEG to age changes in relative power. We found that relative power and periodic activity trajectories differed in this period in all the frequency bands but alpha. Furthermore, aperiodic EEG activity flattened between 6 and 18 months. More importantly, only alpha relative power was exclusively related to periodic activity, whereas aperiodic components of the signal significantly contributed to the relative power of activity in theta and beta bands. Thus, relative power in these frequencies is influenced by developmental changes of the aperiodic activity, which should be considered for future studies.

Effortful control (EC) is a dimension of temperament that encompass individual differences in self-regulation and the control of reactivity. Much research suggests that EC has a strong foundation on the development of executive attention, but increasing evidence also shows a significant contribution of the rearing environment to individual differences in EC. The aim of the current study was to predict the development of EC at 36 months of age from early attentional and environmental measures taken in infancy using a machine learning approach. A sample of 78 infants participated in a longitudinal study running three waves of data collection at 6, 9, and 36 months of age. Attentional tasks were administered at 6 months of age, with two additional measures (i.e., one attentional measure and another self-restraint measure) being collected at 9 months of age. Parents reported household environment variables during wave 1, and their child’s EC at 36 months. A machine-learning algorithm was implemented to identify children with low EC scores at 36 months of age. An “attention only” model showed greater predictive sensitivity than the “environmental only” model. However, a model including both attentional and environmental variables was able to classify the groups (Low-EC vs. Average-to-High EC) with 100% accuracy. Sensitivity analyses indicate that socio-economic variables together with attention control processes at 6 months, and self-restraint capacity at 9 months, are the most important predictors of EC. Results suggest a foundational role of executive attention processes in the development of EC in complex interactions with household environments and provide a new tool to identify early markers of socio-emotional regulation development.

Effortful control (EC) describes individual differences in self-regulation, with a strong attentional basis. Moreover, during early childhood EC has a central role on children’s socio-emotional adjustment and academic achievement. The aim of the current study was to predict the development of EC at 36 months of age from early attentional and environmental measures taken in infancy using a machine learning approach. A sample of 75 infants participated in a longitudinal study running different waves of data collection at 6, 9 and 36 months of age. Attentional tasks were administered at 6 months of age and two additional measures were collected at 9 months of age. Parents reported household environment variables during wave 1, and their child’s EC at 36 months. A machine -learning algorithm was implemented to identify children with low EC scores at 36 months of age. An “attention only” model showed greater predictive sensitivity than the “environmental only” model. However, a model including both attentional and environmental variables was able to classify the groups (Low-EC vs Average-to-High EC) with 100% accuracy. Sensitivity analyses indicate that socio-economic variables together with attention control processes at 6-months, and self-restraint capacity at 9-months, are the most important predictors of EC. Results suggest a foundational role of executive attention processes in the development of EC in complex interaction with household environment and provide a new tool to identify early markers of socio-emotional regulation development.