Speed of Information Processing in Infants and Adults: Age Differences in Saccadic Reaction Time Sensitivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Speed of information processing (SIP) is an important factor for cognitive development. Determining the developmental trajectory of SIP has been difficult due to a lack of continuity in the paradigms comparing adults’ and infants’ SIP nor continuity in the stimulus feature set (spatial vs content) of uncertainty. Further, for spatial uncertainty, although adults’ manual RTs have been shown to increase linearly with increasing choices, their saccadic RTs seem to not. Seven-month-old infants’ saccadic RTs, in contrast, have been shown to increase with more target choices as expected (Dougherty & Haith, 1997). What is the developmental course from infancy that enables this discrepancy in saccadic RTs that increase with uncertainty at 7 months but not in adults? Method: To address this question, the present study used the same eye movement paradigm across ages as a means to bridge the discontinuities and assess the developmental discrepancy. Adults’ and 5- and 9-month-old infants’ reactive saccades were measured across 100 trials in a comparable choice reaction time task. Participants had to make an eye movement, starting from a central fixation, to a target at one of a possible 1, 2, 4, 6, or 8 spatial locations arranged as a circular array. Results: Both 5- and 9-month-olds’ saccadic RTs increased linearly with more choice alternatives (i.e. more uncertainty), but 9-month-olds’ increased at a shallower rate, approaching adults’ saccadic RT function which did not exhibit an increase with more choices. Conclusion: Findings revealed that there exists a developmental trend in saccadic RTs for spatially-defined SIP, in that as infants age, saccadic responses become less sensitive to spatial uncertainty, and approach adult-like performance. Decreasing saccade sensitivity may be due to developmental changes in the influence of response selection or in the functioning of inhibitory mechanisms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".