brain anatomy is involved as in adult studies. Of course, the result 

 of activating this anatomy for observing an error is not the same as 

 the activation in adults for self-made errors, where the adults actu- 

 ally slow down after an error and adjust their performance. However, 

 it suggests that, even very early in life, the anatomy of the executive 

 attention system is at least partly in place. 



We also began a longitudinal study with infants of 7 months 

 (Sheese et al., in prep.). We studied eye movements that occurred 

 when attractive stimuli appeared in fixed sequence of locations on 

 a screen in front of the child. On most occasions the children moved 

 their eyes to the stimulus, but on some occasions they moved their 

 eyes to the location at which the stimulus would occur prior to it 

 being presented. We argued that the anticipatory movements were 

 an early form of voluntary response because they actually antici- 

 pated the visual event (see fig. 9). To introduce conflict we used the 

 sequence 1-2-1-3, where given a stimulus at 1 the infant would not 

 know to move to 2 or 3 without a consideration of what had hap- 

 pened before. In support of the idea that the anticipatory movements 

 reflected the executive attention system, we found that 3.5-year-olds 

 showed a correlation between performance in voluntary key-press 

 tasks and the tendency to make correct anticipations in the visual 

 sequence study (Rothbart et al., 2003). 



In the first session of our longitudinal study we used two other 

 tasks, the first in which the infants were presented with novel objects 

 and the second in which they saw somewhat disturbing masks 

 (Sheese et al., in prep.). Anticipatory looking was related to more 

 hesitant initial approach to the toys, including longer latencies to 

 initial reaching, and longer duration of looking without physically 

 touching the toy. Infants rated by their parents as higher in Positive 

 Affect (often called Surgency) showed lower latencies to physically 

 engage the toys, and higher frequencies of engagement. These re- 

 sults suggest that an early form of executive attention may allow 

 for the modulation of positive affect and related approach tenden- 

 cies. Anticipatory looking was also positively related to greater use 

 of sucking as a self-soothing mechanism during the mask presen- 

 tation. These results indicate that anticipatory looking is related both 

 to caution in reaching toward novel toys, and to aspects of the reg- 



13 



