Attentional Switching in Infants as a Function of Birth Experience: An Eye Movement Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies have shown that visuospatial attentional performance in a Posner-like attentional cueing task by 3-month-old and 6-month-old infants, and adults, is influenced by birth experience; that is, whether they were delivered via C-section or vaginally. In particular, these findings suggested that C-section birth produces aberrant bottom-up attentional mechanisms. What is not known is whether this birth experience effect produces deficits in selective attention that are specific to the mechanisms engaged by peripheral cueing or translates to other attentional phenomena. To this end, in this study, 6-month-old infants born either vaginally or via C-section participated in an expectation cueing task that used central cueing and their anticipatory and reactive saccades were measured. In the first condition, infants saw centrally presented cues, one of the cues predicted a target to the left and the other predicted a target to the right. Halfway through, the cue that predicted a target to the left side, for example, switched and now predicted a target on the right side and vice versa. In the second condition, which served as a control, the cues did not predict target location during the first half of trials. In the second half, the cues now reliably predicted the target location. Results have indicated that 6-month-old infants, irrespective of birth experience, form expectations for the cue-target location relation and exhibit anticipatory saccades when that relation is predictable. When the cue-target location relation is switched, infants’ anticipatory saccades decreased irrespective of birth experience. Latencies of reactive saccade saccades, however, increased post-switch for infants born by C-section but not for those born vaginally. These findings suggest that C-section birth impacts selective attention mechanisms irrespective of the task. More importantly, that the effect of C-section birth is reflected in reactive saccades and not anticipatory saccades is consistent an aberrant bottom-up attentional mechanism.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".