Ithaca College

Judith Pena-Shaff presented preliminary outcomes related to infant visual attention as part of the inter-disciplinary Tots-on-Bots research.

 Looking duration to visual stimuli is thought to reflect patterns of information processing or attentional control in infants. In this study, we examined the effect of independent locomotion in infants’ visual attention to a dynamic puppet stimulus. The results show that pre-crawling  infants who had the opportunity to navigate the environment independently using a robotic device over a period of two months, demonstrated substantially greater peak look duration to a visual stimulus than infants who did not have independent mobility experience. This outcome suggests that independent locomotion led to changes in infants’ regulatory abilities and executive control of attention.

Reference:

Muscalu, L., Pena-Shaff, J., Rader, N., Dennis, C., Larin, H., & Stansfield, S. (2017, August). The effect of robotically-assisted independent locomotion on attention in pre-crawling infants. Poster presented at the American Psychological Association (APA) annual meeting, Washington, D.C.