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We all know what attention is. William James said it best:
Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
James is describing the spotlight model of attention: If the world is a vast stage, then we only notice things that fall within the narrow circle of illumination. Everything outside the spotlight remains invisible. This is because, as James pointed out, the act of attention is intertwined with the act of withdrawal; to concentrate on one thing is to ignore everything else.
And this brings me to my question: How do babies pay attention? What is it like to look at the world like an infant? The question is particularly interesting because the ability to pay attention, focusing that spotlight on a thin slice of the stage, depends on the frontal cortex, that lobe of brain behind the forehead. Alas, the frontal cortex isn’t fully formed until late adolescence – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – which means that it’s just beginning to solidify in babies. The end result is that little kids struggle to focus.
This has led the UC-Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – I’m a huge fan of her latest book, The Philosophical Baby – to suggest that babies don’t have a spotlight of attention: They have a lantern. If attention is like a focused beam in adults, then it’s more like a glowing bulb in babies, casting a diffuse radiance across the world. This crucial difference in attention has been demonstrated indirectly in a variety of experiments. For instance, when preschoolers are shown a photograph of someone – let’s call her Jane— looking at a picture, and asked questions about what Jane is paying attention to, the weirdness of their attention becomes clear. Not surprisingly, the kids agree that Jane is thinking about the picture she’s staring at. But they also insist that she’s thinking about the picture frame, and the wall behind the picture, and the chair lurking in her peripheral vision. In other words, they believe that Jane is attending to whatever she can see.
Or consider this memory task designed by John Hagen, a developmental psychologist at the University of Michigan. A child is given a deck of cards and shown two cards at a time. The child is told to remember the card on the right and to ignore the card on the left. Not surprisingly, older children and adults are much better at remembering the cards they were told to focus on, since they’re able to direct their attention. However, young children are often better at remembering the cards on the left, which they were supposed to ignore. The lantern casts its light everywhere.
And now there’s a brand new paper in Psychological Science by Faraz Farzin, Susan Rivera and David Whitney that provides some of the best evidence yet for the lantern hypothesis. The experiment itself involved tracking the eye movements of infants between 6 and 15 months of age. The researchers used a special stimuli known as a Mooney face. What makes these images useful is that they can’t be perceived using bottom-up sensory processes. Instead, the only way to see the shadowed faces is to stare straight at them – unless we pay attention the faces remain incomprehensible, just a mass of black and white splotches. In this experiment, however, the babies were able to perceive the faces even when they were located in the periphery of their visual field. (Trust me: You can’t do this.) Because their lantern was so diffuse, they were able to notice stimuli on a much vaster sensory stage. In subsequent experiments, the researchers found that this lantern of attention came with a tradeoff. While babies notice more, they see with less precision. In fact, the “effective spatial resolution” of infants’ visual perception was only half that of adults, although it steadily increased with age.
In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik speculates that, while we often assume the inability to pay attention is a failing, a limitation imposed on infants by their mushy frontal lobes, it also confers certain advantages. For starters, it allows young children to figure out the world at an incredibly fast pace. Although babies are born utterly helpless, within a few years they’ve mastered everything from language – a toddler learns 10 new words every day – to complex motor skills such as walking. According to this new view of the baby brain, many of the mental traits that used to seem like developmental shortcomings, such as infants’ inability to focus their attention, are actually crucial assets in the learning process. Because babies notice everything, they’re better able to figure out how it all hangs together. So the next time you look at a baby, remember: They can see more than you.
參考譯文：
我們都知道專注是什么意思，威廉詹姆斯說得最好：
(聚精會神的)專注是，在同時存在幾個可能的觀察對象或思考對象時，大腦清晰而生動地牢牢抓住其中一個的狀態。專注的本質是意識的聚焦和集中。這就意味著舍棄一些東西，以便更有效地處理所專注的事情。專注是與困惑，迷茫，浮躁 (法語叫distraction，德語叫Zerstreutheit) 恰恰相反的心理狀態。
詹姆斯描述的人們專注的"聚光燈模型"是，如果世界是一個大舞臺，那么我們只注意到聚光燈照亮的小圈子范圍內的事物。聚光燈照亮的區以外，一片漆黑。正如詹姆斯指出的，這是因為人們的專注行為與視而不見交織在一起; 專心于一件事情就意味著無視除此以外的其他的一切。
這使我想到我的問題: 嬰兒們如何專注？像嬰幼兒那樣看世界是一個什么樣子？現在讓問題特別有趣的是，人類關注的能力，即僅僅注意舞臺上的聚光燈下那一小塊地方的能力，是由額葉皮質(前額背后的腦葉) 決定的。但是額葉皮質，直到青春期后期, 才能完全形成。這意味著，嬰幼兒期的大腦還沒完全發育成熟。最終的結果是，小孩子為了專注，必須要費很大力氣。
這就導致了加州大學伯克利分校的發展心理學家阿里思-高坡尼科(Alison Gopnik)建議說，嬰幼兒實際上沒有一個關注焦點：他們有的只是燈籠。( 我很喜歡她的最新著作，"哲學嬰兒"The Philosophical Baby) 如果成人的注意力像一束探照燈光，那么嬰幼兒的更像是一個燈泡，光芒普照四面八方。注意力的這個關鍵的區別，已被各種實驗間接地證明了。例如，當研究者向學齡前兒童顯示某個人的照片時，讓我們稱她為"簡"，并詢問兒童，簡正在盯著看什么東西時，兒童們關于注意力的答案就會變得很古怪。毫不奇怪，孩子們一致認為簡是盯著看一張畫。但是，他們還堅持認為，她還在看著畫框，及其掛著畫的背后那面墻，以及邊上放著的椅子。換句話說，孩子們認為簡是在看著一切她可以看到的東西。
美國密歇根大學的發展心理學家約翰-哈根設計了一個記憶任務。他給孩子們一副牌，并一次顯示其中的兩張牌。他要求孩子記住右邊的牌，無視左邊的牌。毫不奇怪，年齡較大的兒童和成年人記住的牌比較多，因為他們能夠聚焦他們的注意力。然而，年齡小的孩子往往記住一些應該忽視的左邊的牌。燈籠的光芒果然一視同仁地普照四面八方。
法拉茲-法曾，蘇珊-里維拉和大衛-惠特尼在"心理科學"雜志上有一篇新論文，為燈籠的假設提供了到目前為止最好的證據。實驗本身涉及到跟蹤6至15個月大的嬰幼兒的眼球運動。研究人員使用一個已知的特殊的名叫"穆尼臉譜"的刺激方法。使得這些圖像有用的是，它們不能被自下而上的感覺過程所理解。相反，只有直直地盯著它們看 ，才能看出那些陰影區到底是什么，否則，它們看起了就像是一些無法理解的黑色和白色的斑點。但是，在這個實驗中，嬰幼兒能夠感知到這些面孔，即使把它們放置在嬰幼兒視野的邊緣。 （相信我，你這樣的成年人無法做到），因為他們的燈籠是如此的照亮四方，使得他們能夠在一個更廣闊的舞臺上感知外界的刺激。在隨后的實驗中，研究人員發現，這種注意力的燈籠也不是白來的。雖然嬰幼兒看到的更多一些，但他們看到的，不是那么精確。事實上，嬰幼兒的視覺感受“等效空間分辨率”，只有成年人的一半，雖然后來會隨著年齡長大而不斷地增加。
在"哲學嬰兒"一書中，高坡尼科推測，盡管我們一般認為，無法專注是一個缺點，是漿糊狀的腦額葉皮質對于嬰幼兒施加的一種局限，其實，無法專注也有一定的優勢。首先，它可以讓嬰幼兒以一個令人難以置信的快節奏，了解身邊這個世界。雖然剛出生時嬰兒是完全無助的，出生后的幾年之內，他們就已經能夠掌握從語言到肢體技能的一切。 一個三歲的孩子，每天能學會10個新詞，能做像走步一類的復雜的身體運動。根據這項新的關于嬰幼兒大腦的觀念，很多以前認為是發育缺陷的精神特質，如嬰幼兒注意力的無法集中，實際上是嬰幼兒在學習過程中的一項極其重要的資產。由于嬰幼兒注意到了身邊的一切，他們能夠更好地了解全部事情是如何聯系在一起的。所以，下次當你看到一個嬰幼兒，記住：他們看到的可能比你看到的還要多一些。
