And when talking about attention in babies we often refer to just one thing – how long a baby looks at something, known by researchers as attentional gaze. As we know from our own lives, simply looking at something for a period of time by no means guarantees that we are giving it our full attention; we also need to be internally focused on the information that we want to encode and remember, we need to recognise patterns, and we need to be able to filter out all the other unimportant information that we may be taking in at the same time.
