Attention and Multistep Problem Solving in 24-Month-Old Children

Making the process of strategy choice visible: Inhibition and motor demands impact preschoolers' real-time problem solving

To examine the real-time process of strategy choice and execution and the role of inhibition in problem solving, 4- to 6-year-old children were asked to navigate a ball around a maze board under high- and low-precision motor demands. Employing a motor problem-solving task made normally hidden cognitive processes observable. Sequential analysis revealed two subtypes of inhibition (response and attentional) that are involved in problem solving and different developmental trajectories for each. Cognition-action trade-offs due to motor and inhibition demands adversely impacted children's strategy choices, but contributed to heightened variability of strategies. Children used fewer strategies with age, reflecting more efficient problem solving due to increasing inhibitory control. When solutions required precision, preschoolers were more likely to have difficulty inhibiting irrelevant and distracting strategies and maintaining appropriate strategies. By preschool age, executive functioning serves to make strategic motor control possible. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCLxK7dvheE.

Cognition-Action Trade-Offs Reflect Organization of Attention in Infancy

This chapter discusses what cognition-action trade-offs in infancy reveal about the organization and developmental trajectory of attention. We focus on internal attention because this aspect is most relevant to the immediate concerns of infancy, such as fluctuating levels of expertise, balancing multiple taxing skills simultaneously, learning how to control attention under variable conditions, and coordinating distinct psychological domains. Cognition-action trade-offs observed across the life span include perseveration during skill emergence, errors and inefficient strategies during decision making, and the allocation of resources when attention is taxed. An embodied cognitive-load account interprets these behavioral patterns as a result of limited attentional resources allocated across simultaneous, taxing task demands. For populations where motor errors could be costly, like infants and the elderly, attention is typically devoted to motor demands with errors occurring in the cognitive domain. In contrast, healthy young adults tend to preserve their cognitive performance by modifying their actions.

The Trajectory of Concurrent Motor and Vocal Behaviors Over the Transition to Crawling in Infancy

To document the trajectory of motor and vocal behaviors in real and developmental time, researchers observed infants at each of 4 biweekly naturalistic play sessions over the transition to crawling. An exhaustive and mutually exclusive coding scheme documented every vocalization and posture. Odds ratios of the likelihood of a given posture-vocalization dyad revealed that vocalization and crawling were significantly unlikely to co-occur at the session marking the onset of crawling. Infants' allocation of attention over the transition to crawling prompted behavioral trade-offs. During mastery of a novel skill, infants had difficulty allocating attention to multiple tasks, but with experience a decrease in attentional load for the new skill allowed performance of simultaneous behaviors in other domains to occur.

Step by step: a microgenetic study of the development of strategy choice in infancy

To examine patterns of strategy choice and discovery during problem-solving of a novel locomotor task, 13.5- and 18-month-old infants were placed at the top of a staircase and encouraged to descend. Spontaneous stair descent strategy choices were documented step by step and trial by trial to provide a microgenetic account of problem-solving in action. Younger infants tended to begin each trial walking, were more likely to choose walking with each successive step, and were more likely to lose their balance and have to be rescued by an experimenter. Conversely, older infants tended to begin each trial scooting, were more likely to choose scooting with each successive step, and were more likely to use a handrail to augment balance on stairs. Documenting problem-solving microgenetically across age groups revealed striking similarities between younger infants' strategy development and older children's behaviour on more traditionally cognitive tasks, including using alternative strategies, mapping prior experiences with strategies to a novel task, and strengthening new strategies. As cognitive resources are taxed during a challenging task, resources available for weighing alternatives or inhibiting a well-used strategy are reduced. With increased motor experience, infants can more easily consider alternative strategies and maintain those solutions over the course of the trial.