Abstract

Children can be classified differently on how much time they employ to habituate to a stimulus and how they direct the attention when a new stimulus is paired with a familiar one (short or long-lookers children). The first purpose of the research is to evaluate if specific attentive competences present in 3 months old infants can be indicative of the social, cognitive, comunicative and motor development, both at the same age and during the first nine months of life. The second purpose is to verify if being short or long-lookers can influence the communicative development valued at the age of nine months. Various analyses demonstrated that the initial hypotheses can be confirmed only in part. The socio-cognitive and motor development is not significantly influenced by the type of attention, on the contrary type of attention affects the communicative development at the age of 9 months.