Distractibility in infancy: the effects of distractor characteristics and type of attention.

Two experiments investigated the role of distractor characteristics and type of object-directed attention on infants' distraction latencies during object exploration. In Experiment 1, 7- and 10-month-old infants' distraction latency was a function of both attention and the characteristics of the distractors. Infants took longer to turn toward distractors during focused object-directed attention than when engaged in more casual attention. In addition, their latencies were longer regardless of attention type when the distractors were unimodal (e.g., consisting of only a visual or an auditory component) than when they were bimodal (e.g., consisting of both auditory and visual components). Experiment 2 demonstrated that infants exhibit shorter distraction latencies toward complex than simple bimodal distractors. These results are discussed in the context of Allport's (1989) model of attention and suggest that infants' allocation of attentional resources, as measured by distraction latencies, is influenced both by the characteristics of the distractor and by the type of infants' object-directed attention.