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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.
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This content will become publicly available on September 10, 2026
Rethinking the study of newborn sociality: Challenges and opportunities
Growing empirical evidence from the past quarter century reveals surprising sociality in newborns—infants in the first 28 postnatal days—including their ability to elicit and sustain contingent interactions with mutual gaze, social smiling, and sensitively timed, speech-like vocalizations. Newborns seem to have communicative expectations and behave as if they predict others’ goal-directed actions. Despite these discoveries, I review key barriers to progress in newborn developmental science. First, newborn social behavior research has almost exclusively focused on “average” development—based primarily on White, wealthy, English-speaking, Western, populations—treating interindividual differences as noise rather than meaningful, variability. Focusing almost exclusively on averages, especially with small sample sizes, ignores interindividual differences and hinders discoveries. Second, there are few studies of newborn sociality beyond the first postnatal week. In part, this gap in our understanding may be due to, and a consequence of, the mischaracterizations of newborns’ behaviors as passive, limited, disorganized, and low-level reflexes that are subcortically driven. Finally, researchers often assume that newborns’ behaviors are largely independent of experience. To the contrary, newborns’ need for nearly continuous social contact provides them with rich social learning opportunities, which have been shown to have lasting impacts on their development. Given the uniqueness and plasticity of this period, and their high vulnerability, developmental scientists are doing newborns a disservice by neglecting to characterize their social repertoires within and across diverse populations. Awareness of newborns’ social capacities will facilitate a more objective, accurate view of their social potential.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1653737
- PAR ID:
- 10636503
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Infant Behavior and Development
- Volume:
- 81
- ISSN:
- 0163-6383
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 102149
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- neonate infant social cognition infancy sociability social development
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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