ANSRS
Attention, Self-Regulation, and Psychopathology
in Children and Young Adolescents (ANSRS)
Funding period: July 1, 2008–June 30, 2013
Principal Investigator: Dr. Kristina Racer
Funded by: National Institutes of Health
The ANSRS project is part of a program of research that seeks to identify barriers to self-regulation and develop methods to tailor intervention and prevention to individual self-regulatory strengths and weaknesses. The ANSRS project was designed to clarify the role of selective attention in the development of self-regulation and psychopathology.
Selective attention enhances the processing of certain information to the (relative) exclusion of other information. By “gating” information for further processing, selective attention is a critical prerequisite to higher order cognitive, emotional, and executive functions. Deficits in selective attention could therefore have wide-ranging effects on behavior and psychological adjustment.
This project involves a series of laboratory studies that will (a) characterize the development of both automatic (stimulus-driven) and voluntary (goal-driven) attention processes in typically developing children, (b) determine whether individual differences in automatic and voluntary attention are related to self-regulatory skill and psychosocial adjustment among typically developing and among high-risk samples of children, and (c) determine whether individual differences in the balance between the two processes (“attentional flexibility”) are associated with self-regulation skills and with risk of psychopathology. These studies use event-related potential (ERP) indices of attentional processes. Scalp-recorded ERPs provide a precise measure of the time course of mental operations and can reveal attention effects that are completely masked in overt behavioral response measures. ERPs can also measure the processing of stimuli even when there is no behavioral response, which allows us to examine the brain response to both attended and unattended information.
Progress 2009
In the early months of 2009 we have been in the midst of data collection for our study of the typical development of attention from age 7 to 14 years. These data will help us determine how attention changes in middle childhood and whether individual differences in attention are associated with self-regulatory skill and psychological health.
