preview

Who Is Chris The California Department Of Education?

Good Essays

From six to eight months of age, a large proportion of Chris’s waking hours are spent exploring objects of interest. However, prior to his gaining mobility, he must utilize a great deal of cognitive function to do this in the absence of certain motor skills. Chris’s skill in one particular cognitive domain, attention maintenance, emerges when he tries to reach desired objects and underlies growth in other aspects of cognitive development, such as cause-and-effect, spatial relationships, and problem solving. Regardless of Chris’s success in autonomously reaching the object, the process of trying to complete his goal exercises these cognitive skills.
For the purposes of this description of Chris’s behavior, I will use the California Department of Education’s (2009) term, attention maintenance, to refer to a cognitive function that is synonymous with sustained attention: the sustained, exclusive focus of a behavior system that principally improves information processing in that system (Richards, 2004, as cited by Courage & Setliff, 2010). Because attention maintenance works to enhance information processing, it plays a major role in a number of cognitive functions (Oakes & Tellinghuisen, 1994). Furthermore, attention maintenance at eight months predicts cognitive status at 2 years (Kopp & Vaughn, 1982). In order to determine the presence of attention maintenance, researchers measure heart rate deceleration and use eye-tracking techniques to calculate the amount of time that

Get Access