Freeze-Frame: A new infant inhibition task and its relation to frontal cortex tasks during infancy and early childhood

Karla Holmboe*, R. M. Pasco Fearon, Gergely Csibra, Leslie A. Tucker, Mark H. Johnson

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

The current study investigated a new, easily administered, visual inhibition task for infants termed the Freeze-Frame task. In the new task, 9-month-olds were encouraged to inhibit looks to peripheral distractors. This was done by briefly freezing a central animated stimulus when infants looked to the distractors. Half of the trials presented an engaging central stimulus, and the other half presented a repetitive central stimulus. Three measures of inhibitory function were derived from the task and compared with performance on a set of frontal cortex tasks administered at 9 and 24 months of age. As expected, infants' ability to learn to selectively inhibit looks to the distractors at 9 months predicted performance at 24 months. However, performance differences in the two Freeze-Frame trial types early in the experiment also turned out to be an important predictor. The results are discussed in terms of the validity of the Freeze-Frame task as an early measure of different components of inhibitory function.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)89-114
Number of pages26
JournalJournal of experimental child psychology
Volume100
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2008
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Early childhood
  • Frontal cortex
  • Infancy
  • Inhibition
  • Longitudinal research

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