# The development of sustained attention in infants

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AT COLUMBIA · 2020 · $528,492

## Abstract

Project Summary / Abstract
Infant attention consists of multiple phases, including stimulus orienting, sustained attention and attention termination.
These phases index overall arousal/alertness functions of the brain, and modulate specific attention systems in the cortex.
The PI has used heart rate as an index of the alertness/arousal system and shown the effects of attention on a wide variety
of infant information processing systems. This has been done with behavioral methods to measure attention and with
psychophysiological and neuroimaging methods to examine the effect of sustained attention on specific brain processes.
A significant advance in the prior grant period was the development of tools to use infant structural MRIs for realistic
models of the infant head and brain for cortical source analysis of ERP. The current project will use these tools to study
the relation between sustained attention and brain areas involved in endogenously-cued spatial attention by identifying the
generators of ERP components with cortical source analysis. The project also will examine the effects of attention on the
cortical response to face stimuli. The tools developed in the prior grant period will be refined to improve the cortical
source analysis, generalize the procedures to doing cortical source analysis in infants without structural MRIs, and
generalized to other infant neuroimaging methods.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9948494
- **Project number:** 5R01HD018942-34
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AT COLUMBIA
- **Principal Investigator:** JOHN E RICHARDS
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $528,492
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1988-08-01 → 2022-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9948494

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9948494, The development of sustained attention in infants (5R01HD018942-34). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9948494. Licensed CC0.

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