A Dynamic Systems Approach to Visual Attention in Infancy

Abstract

Infants live in a visually cluttered world, and prioritizing attention to meaningful information is arguably the most important challenge they face to efficiently learn about their surroundings. To do so, infants must coordinate multiple attention processes across different timescales. My program of research takes a systems-level approach, applying methods from Complexity Science to understand how infant attention becomes self-organized and displays evidence of cross-scale interactivity in the first years of life. My dissertation will be the first study to examine how brain development supports the coordination of these processes that are critical for visual exploration in infancy.