Sustained Attention: Alternative to Joint Attention or Ambiguous Concept?

Abstract

For forty years it has been assumed that joint attention is a driving force in the development of early communication (Bates, 1979), and much evidence has been provided to support this idea. Shared attention at the end of the infant’s first year has been found to relate to the infant’s first words (Baldwin, 1995; Bates, 1979; Bruner, 1974; Markus et al., 2000; Tomasello, 1988, 1995; Tomasello & Todd, 1983), early learning (Striano et al., 2006), emotion regulation (Morales et al., 2005), social development (Mundy & Sigman, 2006; Vaughan Van Hecke et al., 2007) and early symbolic thinking (Mundy & Jarrold, 2010). A few recent investigations have suggested an alternative position, that it is infants’ abilities to sustain attention rather than share a focus with their caregiver, that may reveal the underlying mechanism for these achievements, particularly their early vocabulary growth (Yu et al., 2019). Although this literature is far smaller, it has received a lot of interest. Not only has it been used to explain individual differences in vocabulary acquisition (Brooks et al., 2018), it has also been shown to relate to cognitive performance, notably problem solving in the later toddler period (Choudhury & Gorman, 2000). This recent research posits a challenge to traditional theories, suggesting that joint attention may merely be a proxy for the ability to sustain a focus on objects (toys and people), as the true driving force behind later developmental abilities. Given the centrality of joint attention as a construct (Carpenter et al., 1998), the theoretical implications could be major. Sustained attention is characterised by a focus or fixation on a particular stimulus. The recent literature is not wholly clear about what this reveals, but it is implied that attention is a demonstration of the ability to be more connected to objects and, therefore, an ability to use this information to develop more complex associations – what Richards and Casey (1992) term “information processing.” Yet to have to compete with, or replace, joint attention, the construct of sustained attention needs much more critical analysis. The issues with this concept can be divided into 2 main areas, measurement and definitional problems, which we explore in turn before exploring some deeper theoretical concerns.