Inhibition of return in very young infants: A longitudinal study

Inhibition of return (IOR) was measured at 2-week intervals from 6 weeks to 6 months of age in 16 infants. IOR refers to the tendency not to return at tention to a recently attended location. A spatial cueing task adapted to t he attentional and oculomotor skills of the youngest infants was used. At 6 weeks, infants looked more frequently and faster to cued targets. Looks to uncued targets were more frequent than looks to cued targets from 16 weeks , and faster than looks to cued targets from 18 weeks. Infants differed in the tempo of development and the level of performance on both indices of IO R in the final session, individual preferences for uncued targets fluctuate d from session to session, Unstable looking biases were observed in all inf ants. They explained a significant part of the intra-individual differences in preference. Latency to look to uncued targets was stable from the 18-we ek session.