Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Understanding the nuanced relationship between attention andlearning in young children is difficult due to the lack ofdevelopmentally appropriate measures of attention. Youngchildren are in a measurement gap - they are too old formeasures typically employed with infants and toddlers andoften too young to produce useful data from more traditionalmeasures used with older children and adults. Due to thepaucity of developmentally appropriate measures it ischallenging to employ best practices and utilize convergingmeasures of attention. Additionally, existing behavioralobservation methods are time consuming and can suffer frompoor reliability due to their subjective nature. The presentstudy aims to address these limitations by leveragingaffordable technology to create a novel measure of attention,the Wiggleometer. The Wiggleometer is a custom chair thatcovertly measures body movement as an index of attention.The preliminary results help establish the concurrent validityof the measure and suggest the Wiggleometer can beemployed to better predict children’s learning outcomes.