Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The University of Houston System received a $332,140 project grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) under the Child Health and Human Development Extramural Research program (CFDA 93.865), awarded June 1, 2026, with a completion date of March 31, 2031. This longitudinal research initiative investigates the multimodal dynamics of infant sustained attention through coordinated assessment of behavioral, neural, and autonomic systems. The project will enroll typically developing infants between 6 and 30 months and employ integrated measurement technologies including head-mounted eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), and heart rate monitoring (ECG) during naturalistic parent-infant interactions to identify sustained attention episodes and their physiological signatures in real-world settings.

The research deliverables encompass characterization of age-related changes in sustained attention across social contexts, examination of how caregiver scaffolding shapes infant attention development, and predictive analyses linking early multisystem engagement patterns to later individual differences in attention control, language development, and neural function. This ecologically grounded longitudinal approach combines first-person eye tracking with neural and autonomic measures to advance developmental attention theories and clarify how early multisystem dynamics contribute to variation in cognitive and social outcomes during critical periods of infant development.