The development of visual attention in infancy

Over the past decade, the study of attention in infancy has seen dramatic p rogress. This review delineates four attentional functions (alertness, spat ial orienting, attention to object features, and endogenous attention) that are relevant to infancy and uses these functions as a framework for summar izing the developmental course of attention in infancy. Rudimentary forms o f various attentional functions are present at birth, but each of the funct ions exhibits different and apparently dissociable periods of postnatal cha nge during the first years of life. The role of attention in development sh ould therefore be considered in the context of interaction among different systems at different levels of maturity during the first years of life.