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A New Measure for Assessing Four Fundamental Aspects of Attention: The Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP)

Poster presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, March, 2011, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This research was supported by grants from NICHD R01 HD053776, K02 HD064943, and Autism Speaks #1906. Requests for reprints should be sent to the first author at bahrick@fiu.edu. Across development, children exhibit improvements in maintaining, disengaging, and orienting attention (Colombo, 2001; Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). Infants show decreases in processing time and length of individual fixations (Bornstein, Pecheux, & Lecuyer, 1988; Colombo, 1995; Courage, Reynolds, Richards, 2006; Shaddy & Colombo, 2004), as well as increased rates of disengagement away from stimuli (Casey & Richards, 1988; Johnson, Posner, & Rothbart, 1991) across infancy. They also selectively attend to unified multimodal events (e.g., a person speaking) by detecting intersensory redundancy in early development (e.g., synchrony, rhythm, tempo, and intensity invariant across the senses; Bahrick & Lickliter, 2002; Lewkowicz, 2000). Despite the fact that we live in an environment with dynamic, multimodal events, attention has typically been studied using static, unimodal visual stimuli (e.g., pictures of faces or patterns lacking sound or movement). Moreover, various indices of attention have typically been studied in isolation. The use of different methods and measures has also made results difficult to integrate across studies and thus, we lack an integrated picture of the development of basic aspects of attention to naturalistic, dynamic, multimodal social and nonsocial events. To address this need, we developed a new procedure, the Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP) which combines measures of speed, duration, and accuracy of looking in order to assess four fundamental indices of attention (disengagement, orienting, maintenance, and intersensory processing) to audiovisual social and nonsocial events in a single test. This powerful new combination of measures has the potential to index individual differences along four fundamental “building blocks” of attention and assess interrelations among these measures in infants and children of typical and atypical development such as autism. Further, findings from dynamic, multimodal conditions can be more easily generalized to attention in the natural environment of dynamic, multimodal events.