We explored the role that exogenous and endogenous competitors for attention play in infants’ abilities to encode and retain information over a 6‐month period. Sixty‐six children visited the laboratory at 15 months, and 32 returned for a second visit at 21 months. Children observed models of conventional‐ relation and enabling‐relation action sequences. Half the children were distracted by a “Mister Monkey” mechanical toy during the conventional‐relation sequence, while the other half was distracted during the enabling‐relation sequence. The Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire indexed endogenous factors at both ages. Immediate postmodel production of target actions indexed encoding efficiency, and 6‐month production of target actions indexed long‐term recall. The exogenous distracter impacted encoding efficiency (i.e., immediate recall), but not long‐term recall. Endogenous factors (i.e., temperament) were primarily associated with long‐term recall. Of special interest was our finding that endogenous factors, especially surgency, moderated the effect of the exogenous distracter. It appears that when learning conventional‐relation sequences in the presence of exogenous distracters, surgency mobilizes attentional resources toward the learning objective; however, when learning enabling‐relation sequences under the same conditions, surgency either boosts the saliency of the distracters or boosts children’s susceptibility to them.

Šiame tyrime buvo tiriama trikdžio įtaka sakadiniams akių judesiams. Eksperimentų serijoje, tiriamieji sekė taikinį, kai kartu su taikiniu atsirasdavo ir trikdis. Trikdis atsirasdavo arčiau taikinio per vidurį kelio arba arčiau fiksacijos taško. Visi trikdžiai buvo ant trajektorijos nuo fiksacijos iki taikinio. Taip pat trikdžių atsiradimo laikas skirdavosi. Siekiamieji akių judesiai buvo paveikti trikdžių. Rezultatai parodė kad trikdis labiau įtakoja horizontalius akies judesius ir kad akių judesiai buvo labiau paveikti kai trikdis buvo per vidurį trajektorijos iki taikinio. / In this research distracter influence for saccadic eye movements was studied. In a series of experiments, participants reached to targets in the presence of visual distracters that were either adjacent to the target or either adjacent to the fixation point. Distracters were located through the reach path. The distracters were presented at different times too. The reaching eye movements were affected by the presence of the distracters The results showed that the distracters affects more horizontal eye movements. And the eyes movements are more affected when distracters were in a middle of path to the target.