BRIEF REPORT Attentional Engagement in Infancy: The Interactive Influence of Attentional Inertia and Attentional State Lisa M. Oakes and Shannon Ross-Sheehy Department of Psychology University of Iowa Kathleen N. Kannass Bureau of Child Research University of Kansas We evaluated the interactive influences of attentional state and attentional inertia on infants’ level of attentional engagement. We assessed infants’ distraction latencies longitudinally at 6.5 and 9 months as they explored toys, and we coded both their attentional state (focused vs. casual) and how long they had been looking at the toy at each distractor onset. Consistent with previous results, both attentional state and attentional inertia contributed to differences in distraction latency. Importantly, the level of attentional engagement was interactively determined by attentional state and attentional inertia. Infants were most resistant to distraction when they were judged to be in a state of focused attention following relatively long looks to the toy, and they were equivalently less resistant to distraction under all other conditions. These re- sults are consistent with a general conceptualization of attentional engagement re- sulting from the interaction of multiple processes. Infants’ visual attention is distributed in complex ways over the duration of a look (for a review, see Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). During a single look infants engage in INFANCY, 5(2), 239–252 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Requests for reprints should be sent to Lisa M. Oakes, Department of Psychology, E11 SSH, Uni- versity of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52240. E-mail: lisa-oakes@uiowa.edu