Multimodal Dynamics of Infant Attention: Eye, Brain, and Heart During Object Play

Sustained attention (SA)—the ability to maintain engagement with people or objects over time—is a foundational skill that supports early learning across domains, including language, cognitive development, and social interaction. Disruptions in early SA have been linked to later difficulties in academic achievement, emotion regulation, and mental health. Yet, little is known about how SA naturally emerges, stabilizes, and becomes self-directed in infancy, particularly in everyday social contexts. This project investigates how SA develops through dynamic coordination among behavioral, neural, and autonomic systems, captured in real time during naturalistic parent–infant interactions. We will conduct a longitudinal study of typically developing infants between 6 and 30 months, integrating head-mounted eye tracking (ET), electroencephalography (EEG), and heart rate monitoring (ECG). This multimodal design enables precise identification of SA episodes and their physiological signatures as they unfold in the real world. We hypothesize that caregiver scaffolding—such as holding—shapes the salience and structure of infants’ attention, triggering coordinated multisystem engagement that supports the emergence of self-directed SA. We will characterize age-related changes in SA, examine its variation across social contexts, and assess whether early multisystem patterns predict later individual differences in attention control, language development, and neural function. This project is innovative in its longitudinal, ecologically grounded approach to studying attention, combining first-person ET with neural and autonomic measures during live interaction. Findings will advance theories of developmental attention and clarify how early multisystem dynamics contribute to variation in cognitive and social outcomes. Project Number: 1R01HD121864-01 | Fiscal Year: 2026 | NIH Institute/Center: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) | Principal Investigator: Hanako Yoshida | Institution: UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON, HOUSTON, TX | Award Amount: $332,140 | Activity Code: R01 | Study Section: Human Complex Mental Function Study Section[HCMF] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11347806