Abstract

The purpose of the study was to test whether newborns' behavior showed charactheristic signs of obligatory attention (increasing level of arousal, manifestations of distress, crying) during prolonged visual fixations of a stimulus. To this end, we extracted 16 subjects (M = 58 hrs.), who presented longer visual fixations from a sample of 40 newborn infants submitted to a visual stimulus ("schematic face or scrambled face") following an infant control procedure. First, facial behavior (coded by MAX) and visual saccades were analyzed during the first 10 secs. and the last 10 secs. of the longest visual fixation of each of the subjects (M = 47.7 sec.). Then, using AFFEX, the presence of obligatory attention was investigated into each of the visual fixations showed by the subjects during the entire experimental proof. Analyses of the data did not show manifestations of distress. This result suggests that the presence of early obligatory attention is absent at birth.