In this thesis, 20 younger children (6-7 years old), 20 older children (9-10 years old) and 20 young adults (18-21 years old) were tested using a modified contextual cueing procedure. They located one particular cartoon character (target) among two sets of other cartoon characters (distracters). The main purpose was to investigate how age interacts with selective attention in contextual cueing. Selective attention was manipulated by varying the degree of similarity between two sets of distracters. Specifically, two levels were used: low heterogeneity (distracters were similar to each other), and high heterogeneity (distracters were different from each other). The results suggested that the younger children exhibited impaired implicit learning in the low heterogeneity condition yet intact implicit learning in the high heterogeneity condition. In contrast, the adults demonstrated robust implicit learning in both conditions. The older children performed at an intermediate level, exhibiting intact implicit learning in both conditions yet at a slower acquisition rate in the low heterogeneity condition than the adults. Therefore a clear transition pattern was observed indicating a developmental difference in selective attention in the acquisition of contextual cueing effects. Older children and adults were more capable of exhibiting contextual cueing effects in the absence of a salient feature difference between distracter sets, suggesting an effective selective attention mechanism based on expectancy. Younger children relied more on salient features than spatial co-occurrences in visual search, suggesting a deficit in the selective attention mechanism. This deficit might be related with factors such as difficulty in perceptual grouping, immature selective attention competence, and limited perceptual and working memory capacities.
This volume presents an up-to-date review of developmental aspects of human attention by leading researchers and theorists. The papers included in the first section consider the ways in which newborns are pretuned to visual, auditory, linguistic, and social features of their environment, as well as how selectivity to these features changes in the first year of life. The following section examines properties of the visual and auditory world that are attention-getting for children. Developmental increases in capacity and strategy are also examined in this section through the study of perception, memory, problem-solving and language. Section III explores several ways in which selective processing can fail in development (e.g. autism, hyperactivity, and psychopathy) while Section IV reports on those aspects of selectivity that are lost (and preserved) in the aging process.
This dissertation was designed to study developmental differences in the way simultaneous and sequential signal to noise ratios impact contextual cueing effects. Contextual cueing refers to a form of implicit associative learning of the target location and its context. Over repeated exposures, participants typically respond faster to repeated displays than to new displays that are not repeated. Researchers have assumed that this reflected the learning of associations between the location of the target and the locations of the distracters in the repeated displays. Couperus et al. (2011) found that 10 year olds were able to show intact contextual cueing when the ratio between the predictive distracters and the unpredictive distracters within each display was 75:25, but not when the ratio was 50:50. In contrast, adults showed significant contextual cueing effects when the ratio was 50:50. Hence, it seems that children and adults are differentially sensitive to noise (irrelevant distracters) in the displays. The current study incorporated two forms of signal to noise ratio (S/N): simultaneous S/N, defined as the ratio of predictive and unpredictive distracters within each display; and sequential S/N, defined as the ratio of repeated and new displays within each block. It was predicted that low S/N might be more detrimental to the learning of contextual cueing effects for children than it was for adults. Three age groups participated in the study: 6-8 year old children, 10-12 year old children and college students. In the simultaneous condition, 20 participants in each group were included in the final analysis. The results suggested that all three groups demonstrated significant and comparable contextual cueing effects across three S/N ratio conditions. In addition, the analysis of search efficiency suggested that all three groups demonstrated guided search. This was indicated by faster search slopes to the repeated displays than to the new displays as a function of set size. Therefore, no developmental difference was found in the simultaneous condition. In the sequential condition, 22 participants in each group were included in the final analysis. The results suggested that adults demonstrated significant contextual cueing effects across all three ratio conditions. Older children demonstrated significant contextual cueing effects in the high and medium conditions but only marginally significant learning in the low condition. By contrast, younger children only demonstrated significant learning in the high and medium conditions, but they did not show significant contextual learning in the low S/N condition. There was a significant developmental difference in the sequential condition. Explicit memory tests conducted after the experiment suggested no conscious awareness about the repetition for any age group in any condition. First, the results suggested that adults have an intact ability to extract repeated information from the information stream, as long as it is at least 33% predictive. Contextual cueing is hence a relatively robust form of implicit learning. The developmental difference found in the sequential but not in the simultaneous condition suggested that the presentation mode of irrelevant information impacted the acquisition of contextual cueing in children. It is likely that children's intact learning in the simultaneous condition reflected their relatively mature selective attention mechanisms. They were able to selectively attend to the predictive information when the unpredictive information was presented on the same scene. The developmental difference observed in the sequential condition might be due to children's immature working memory, especially as it applies to younger children. The practical and methodological implications of this dissertation were also discussed.
During the last three decades, there have been enormous advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of selective attention at the network as well as the cellular level. The Oxford Handbook of Attention brings together the different research areas that constitute contemporary attention research into one comprehensive and authoritative volume. In 40 chapters, it covers the most important aspects of attention research from the areas of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, human and animal neuroscience, computational modelling, and philosophy. The book is divided into 4 main sections. Following an introduction from Michael Posner, the books starts by looking at theoretical models of attention. The next two sections are dedicated to spatial attention and non-spatial attention respectively. Within section 4, the authors consider the interactions between attention and other psychological domains. The last two sections focus on attention-related disorders, and finally, on computational models of attention. Aimed at both scholars and students, the Oxford Handbook of Attention provides a concise and state-of-the-art review of the current literature in this field.
"My experience is what I agree to attend to," wrote William James (1890) nearly a century ago in his Principles of Psychology. Although certainly not the first to recognize the importance of attention in man's experience--poets and philosophers throughout history have touched upon the concept in one way or another-James deserves credit for having accorded attention a central role in the systematic study of the mind. With the advancement of psychology since that time, except during the behaviorist digression, the concept of attention has been an integral part of many prominent theories dealing with learning, thinking, and other aspects of cognitive functioning. Indeed, attention is an important determinant of experience from birth throughout development. This has been an implicit assumption underlying our view of cognition since the writings of Charles Darwin (1897) and Wilhelm Preyer (1888) as well as James, all of whom offered provocative insights about the developing child's commerce with the environment. Al though systematic research on attention in children was slow to pick up during the early part of this century, interest in the developmental study of attention has expanded enormously in recent years.
IV. Developmental & Social Psychology: Simona Ghetti (Volume Editor) (Topics covered include development of visual attention; self-evaluation; moral development; emotion-cognition interactions; person perception; memory; implicit social cognition; motivation group processes; development of scientific thinking; language acquisition; development of mathematical reasoning; emotion regulation; emotional development; development of theory of mind; category and conceptual development; attitudes; executive function.)
