Putting effort into infant cognition

Abstract

Working memory allows for the manipulation of information in support of ongoing tasks, providing a workspace for cognitive processes such as learning, reasoning, and decision making. How well working memory works depends, in part, on effort. Someone who pays attention at the right time and place will have better memory, and performance. In adult cognitive research studies, participants' devotion of maximal task-focused effort is often taken for granted, but in infant studies researchers cannot make that assumption. Here we showcase how pupillometry can provide an easy-to-obtain physiological measure of cognitive effort, allowing us to better understand infants' emerging abilities. In our work, we used pupillometry to measure trial-by-trial fluctuations of effort, establishing that, just as in adults, it influences how well infants could encode information in visual working memory. We hope that by using physiological measures such as pupil dilation, there will be a renewed effort to investigate the interaction between infants' attentive states and cognition.

Keywords: cognitive effort; infant; task-evoked pupil response; visual working memory.

Figures

Figure 1.

(a) Delayed Match Retrieval paradigm. 13-month-old infants (N=22) watched an animation where three face-down cards entered the screen, and then two of them flipped face-up sequentially to show different faces (e.g., a ball and a dog), then flipped back face-down. The third card then flipped face-up, which matched one of the two (now face-down) cards. A delay of 3 seconds then ensued, while eye movements and pupil diameter were monitored. After the 3-second response phase had elapsed, a brief reward animation occurred at the location of the match card (simultaneously, the card was flipped face-up). This was designed to encourage infants to fixate the location of the (face-down) match, in anticipation of the reward. During the response phase, before the onset of the reward, if infants fixated the match before the non-match, this was coded as a correct response. (b) Pupillometric results (groups). Infants were median-split based on their VWM performance. We found that infants who have overall performed better in the memory task had significantly larger pupil dilation during encoding. (c) Pupillometric results (individuals). Individual infants’ average pupil diameter during encoding/maintenance (the second half of the period shown in (b)) significantly correlated with their overall VWM performance. Adapted from “Focused attention predicts visual working memory performance in 13-month-old infants” by C. Cheng, Z. Kaldy, & E. Blaser, 2019, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 36, 100616.