Stability of individual differences in social and nonsocial visual attention from newborn to 14 months

Malik, A, Leung, TS, Zhang, S, Zeng, G, Maylott, SE, Bainter, S, Messinger, DM, Paukner, A ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3421-1864 and Simpson, EA, 2025. Stability of individual differences in social and nonsocial visual attention from newborn to 14 months. Developmental Psychobiology, 67 (4): e70054. ISSN 0012-1630

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Abstract

Given the foundational nature of infant visual attention and potential cascading effects on later development, studies of individual variability in developmental trajectories in a normative sample are needed. We longitudinally tested newborns (N = 77) at 1-2 and 3-4 weeks, then again at 2, 4, 6, 8 and 14 months of age, assessing individual differences in their attention. Newborns viewed live stimuli (facial gesturing, rotating disk), one at a time, for 3 min each. Older infants viewed a 10-s side-by-side social-nonsocial video (people talking, rotating disk). We found short-term developmental stability of interindividual differences in infants' overall, social, and nonsocial attention, within the newborn period (1-4 weeks), and within the later infancy period (2-14 months). Additionally, we found that overall attention, but not social and nonsocial attention, was developmentally stable long term (newborn through 14 months). This novel finding that newborn overall attention predicts later overall attention through the first year suggests a robust individual difference. This study is a first step toward developing individual difference measures of social and nonsocial attention. Future studies need to understand why newborns vary in their attention and to identify the potential impact of this variability on later social and cognitive development.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Developmental Psychobiology
Creators:	Malik, A., Leung, T.S., Zhang, S., Zeng, G., Maylott, S.E., Bainter, S., Messinger, D.M., Paukner, A. and Simpson, E.A.
Publisher:	Wiley
Date:	July 2025
Volume:	67
Number:	4
ISSN:	0012-1630
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1002/dev.70054 DOI 2455231 Other
Rights:	© 2025 The Author(s). Developmental Psychobiology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	19 Jun 2025 07:49
Last Modified:	19 Jun 2025 07:49
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53763

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