Visual Sequence Task 



Experimenter monitor 



H 



€)€) 



Dr— | H] 



• Monitoring the display of 

 the stimuli 



• Frame-by-frame coding of 

 visual anticipations 



Fig. 9. An apparatus tor studying attention in infants. The infants* eyes are re- 

 corded on camera 1 and camera 2 shows the stimuli. Shifts of the head and eyes to 

 the various locations are taped and the times and directions measured. The stimuli 

 are a fixed sequence of locations such as: upper left, lower, upper left, upper right 

 1-2-1-3 (after Rothbart et al.. 2003). 



ulation of distress in infancy. They also suggest that executive at- 

 tention is present in infancy and serves as one basis for the regu- 

 lation of emotion. 



Genes and Parenting 



We have had the children tested at 7 months brought back at 18- 

 21 months. This time we added an additional task in which the 

 children played with toys in the presence of one of their caregivers. 

 Raters watched the caregiver/child interaction and rated the parents 

 on five dimensions of parental quality according to a schedule de- 

 veloped by NICHD (1993). Although all of the parents were likely 

 concerned and caring, they did differ in their scores, and we divided 

 them at the mean into two groups. One of the groups had a higher 

 quality of parenting, and the other a lower quality. We also geno- 



14 



