Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Infant Behavior & Development 31 (2008) 501–510 Executive attention and self-regulation in infancy Brad E. Sheese a,∗ , Mary K. Rothbart b , Michael I. Posner b , Lauren K. White c , Scott H. Fraundorf d a Department of Psychology, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL, United States b Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States c Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States d Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, United States Received 2 July 2007; received in revised form 7 November 2007; accepted 15 February 2008 Abstract This study investigates early executive attention in infancy by studying the relations between infant sequential looking and other behaviors predictive of later self-regulation. One early marker of executive attention development is anticipatory looking, the act of looking to the location of a target prior to its appearance in that location, a process that involves endogenous control of visual orienting. Previous studies have shown that anticipatory looking is positively related to executive attention as assessed by the ability to resolve spatial conflict in 3–4-year-old children. In the current study, anticipatory looking was positively related to cautious behavioral approach in response to non-threatening novel objects in 6- and 7-month-old infants. This finding and previous findings showing the presence of error detection in infancy are consistent with the hypothesis that there is some degree of executive attention in the first year of life. Anticipatory looking was also related to the frequency of distress, to looking away from disturbing stimuli, and to some self-regulatory behaviors. These results may indicate either early attentional regulation of emotion or close relations between early developing fear and later self-regulation. Overall, the results suggest the presence of rudimentary systems of executive attention in infants and support further studies using anticipatory looking as a measure of individual differences in attention in infancy. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Attention; Self-regulation; Anticipatory looking; Object novelty; Emotion regulation; Infant In recent years several attention networks have been studied in adults (Fan, McCandliss, Fossella, Flombaum, & Posner, 2005) and in children (Rueda, Fan, et al., 2004). The executive attention network is a brain network that has been related to error detection (Dehaene, Posner, & Tucker, 1994; Gehring, Goss, Coles, Meyer, & Donchin, 1993) and the ability to resolve conflict among different response tendencies (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001). These abilities are thought to be critical for the development of self-regulation of thoughts and feelings, and the effortful control of behavior (Posner & Rothbart, 2007). The executive attention network is thought to show a developmental time course (Posner & Rothbart, 2007). However, research on the early development of the executive attention network has been limited due to difficulties in assessing executive attention in infancy. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 309 556 1341. E-mail address: bsheese@iwu.edu (B.E. Sheese). 0163-6383/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2008.02.001