ABSTRACT
Explorations into the orienting of attention continue to enhance our understanding of the development of sensory, perceptual, and cognitive abilities during infancy and early childhood. Although attention is often described in the cognitive terms of information processing, the connections between attention and affective/motivational processes are obvious in descriptive and theoretical accounts of early development (Berg & Sternberg, 1985; Izard & Malatesta, 1987; Piaget, 1981). Discussions of the complex relations between attention and affect are apt to proceed more quickly if we focus on the presumed phenomena rather than the words. Cognitive scientists are coming to a consensus that the abstract term attention involves, at a minimum, three quite different processes whose referents are (a) initial orienting following a change in the sensory field, (b) detection/selection of the event that was the source of the orienting—a more psychological phenomenon, and, finally, (c) sustained attentiveness to the event (Posner, 1995). It is reasonable to suggest that the successive and relatively seamless sequence that begins with orienting and ends with sustained attention is associated with excitability in different lim-bic-cortical systems (Posner, Rothbart, Gerardi, & Thomas-Thrapp, chapter 14, this volume; Robbins & Everitt, 1995; Stormack, Hugdahl, & Posner, 1994) and, therefore, with different emotions. This suggestion of connections between attention and emotion is supported, at a descriptive level, by infants’ behaviors. Consider the following examples from our laboratories.
