Mary K. Rothbart - US grants

The aims of this project are to trace the early development of attentional self-regulation and its relation to the learning of expectations and the control of emotion. We use the method of marker tasks identified in adult patients or by neural imaging methods in order to relate our behavioral findings to underlying neural systems. In the proposed research, experimental methods and correlational analysis are used to address two major issues. The first is the control of expectations. The three to four month period appears to be critical for the maturation of the posterior attention system and thus for expectations regarding the location of objects. Prior to 3 months, infants search for objects as if in a crowded field; after 4 months they move directly to them. We hypothesize that the development of the ability to program an eye movement to an object is an important condition for being able to represent that object in its absence. Programming of eye movement can be assessed by the occurrence of eye movements directly to the target and by the consequent inhibition of the target location. Representation in absence can be studied by anticipatory eye movements to a location indicated by a central cue. Together we believe they index the maturation of the posterior attention system. We propose to study developmental aspects of the relationship between these two skills. We will further relate anticipatory eye movements to the ability of the infant to choose between paired locations based upon the cue (contingency learning). Our prior data suggest independence between these two forms of expectation, and the latter may mark the beginning of the infant's ability to use the anterior attention system to generalize their learning. The second issue involves how the development of the attention system influences emotional regulation. We relate the capacity to disengage attention from a visual focus (between 3 and 4 months of age) to a tendency toward negative emotionality, as reported by parents. We will induce distress by the presentation of checkerboards and observe the relationship of the ability to disengage with the time to soothe. Finally, we will explore the hypothesis that reduced alertness relates to a left turning bias previously found in infants. We believe that deficits in the underlying neural system involved in alertness could be related to developmental disorders of childhood.

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from applicant's abstract): The aim of this research is to trace the early development of attentional systems and to relate these developments to the control of action and emotion. Using marker tasks identified in adult patients and by neural imaging, the applicants are able to relate behavioral findings to underlying neural systems. In the proposed project they trace the development of an executive attention network that has been linked to frontal lobe development. There is reason to believe that this network plays a fundamental role, not only in the development of high level cognitive capacities, but in the self-regulation of emotional states and action. Because attentional self-regulation can result in behavior problems and difficulties in school, research tracing the normal development of, and individual differences in, these controls has important implications for society. Two marker tasks are employed in this project involving 24 to 36 month olds. The first is a spatial Stroop-like task investigating the resolution of conflicts between location and stimulus identity. The second involves learning sequences of locations where the correctness of the association depends on context. Both of these tasks trace the ability to deal with competing response tendencies, a basic component of the executive attention network. Their preliminary data show that these tasks can be made appropriate to measure the performance of children of this age and that they undergo important changes in this period. The first study, a cross-sectional study of 24, 30, and 36 month olds will attempt to replicate the stage-like development of performance on the Stroop task that was found earlier and to relate development of sequence learning to the Stroop performance. In addition, cluster analyses will be performed on the 30 month olds (with additional 30 month old subjects added) to examine the development of attentional mechanisms at this transition age. Following this cross-sectional study, a longitudinal study will be performed examining 30 month old children on the Stroop, Sequence learning and a battery of inhibitory control tasks. The children will be tested every 2 months between 30 and 36 months. In both studies, parent report measures of attention and inhibitory control will also be obtained, along with measures of negative emotionality.

Abstract

Child Temperament and Personality Across Contexts

Mary Rothbart

The major objective of this Workshop on Child Temperament and Personality Across Contexts and the planning project of which it is a part, is to bring together a collaborative network to plan multidisciplinary, cross-cultural research on the development of child temperament and personality. Collaborators organized by James Victor of Hampton University and Mary Rothbart, University of Oregon, will plan projects enabling the group to develop proposals for individual investigator, small collaboration and large-scale projects to meet the NSF objective of integrating child development research across traditional knowledge domains, cultural contexts, and levels of analysis.
The workshop has three specific aims. First, scientists studying biological, emotional, social, and behavioral aspects of temperament and personality will plan the development of uniform temperament and personality measurement scales for children. These researchers include James Victor and Spencer Baker, Hampton University; Mary Rothbart and Gerard Saucier, University of Oregon; Michael Posner, Cornell University; and Charles Halverson and Valerie Havill, University of Georgia. Second, child development collaborators in the domain of risk identification and prevention who study issues across a broad array of contexts (family, child-care, school, community, culture and language) will participate in the project. These include Mark Roosa, Arizona State University; Guillermo Bernal, University of Puerto Rico; Wendy Kliewer, Lenn Murrelle and Evelyn Reed-Victor, Virginia Commonwealth University; Sandee McClowry, New York University; and Lynn Pelco, College of William and Mary. Third, collaborators from both of these domains will address ethnic and cultural contexts in temperament and personality research. Collaborators will plan studies that examine how adult informants in different contexts, describe, interpret, and accommodate individual differences in child temperament and personality.
The work will be based on bringing together independently developed measures of temperament and personality. The initial Planning Workshop is to be held in Eugene, Oregon, no later than November 15, 2001. This workshop will be an intensive meeting, identifying dimensions to be studied across contexts in multidisciplinary collaboration. During day 1 of the workshop, emphasis will be on the common instrument. Dr. Rothbart will present issues relating to the measurement of temperament, including computer-administered tasks of temperament dimensions. Dr. Victor will present results from the Hampton Version personality instrument for developing appropriate dimensions for a common instrument. Discussants for this session will be three distinguished researchers, Dr. Charles Halverson, for child personality from the lexical tradition; Dr. Paul Costa, adult personality; and Gerard Saucier, the adult lexical tradition.
On Day 2, domain specific groups will prepare feedback on development of common measures from the perspective of risk and cross-cultural populations, and identify possible across-site collaborations. The afternoon session will focus on the development of guidelines for collaboration and the formation of domain work groups. The major outcomes for the second day are a) achieving further refinement of plans for development of the common temperament and personality instrument, taking risk and cultural context issues into account, and b) the formation of collaborative work groups for work to be completed in the second phase of the planning grant. After review and feedback, summaries submitted after this meeting will be posted on the planning project website for review and input from the collaborative network, and form the basis for future proposals.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We seek to understand the development of self-regulation during early childhood at all levels from the genetic to behavioral. We have isolated a neural system that appears to underlie a broad range of cognitive and emotional regulatory activities. We now seek to determine the precursors of this system in infancy and to see how well they predict regulatory efficiency during childhood. We are also interested to determine how attention training influences these developments both at age 4 and 7.