Proactive Control Does Not Help Children or Adults Ignore Salient Distracters in Cued Visual Search

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

The ability to selectively focus attention is known to gradually improve during childhood. Proactive (or endogenous) control is a higher-order process which enables individuals to plan-ahead by maintaining information at an early point of processing to guide later behaviour. Adults are adept at using proactive control to direct their attention towards relevant information and away from eye-catching, or salient, distractions (Gaspelin, Leonard & Luck, 2017). It is still debated as to which are the key periods in childhood for the development of this skill and when adult-like proactive control is acquired (Munakata, Chatham & Snyder, 2012; Leclercq & Siéroff, 2013). In this study, we assessed the age that children have developed proactive control and whether it can be used to reduce attentional capture from distractions.
129 participants from three age-groups (5-6, 9-11 & 18-25 years) completed three conditions of a child-adapted cued visual search task. Three different coloured circles were presented; one of which contained the tilted line target. Prior to this, a cue either guided attention towards the target (valid trial: pink cue, target-line in pink circle), away from the target (invalid trial: pink cue, target-line in blue circle) or did not guide attention (neutral trial: pink cue, pink circle absent from display, target-line in blue circle). Cue predictiveness was manipulated in three block conditions: 1) High Predictive (66.67% valid: 33.33% invalid), 2) Low Predictive (33.33% valid: 66.67% invalid) and 3) Baseline (100% neutral). A salient distracter (black diamond) was presented on 41.67% of trials in each block. We expected the High Predictive block to encourage participants to proactively use the cues, which in turn could help them to ignore the salient distracter.
We found that 9-11-year-olds and adults utilised the cues in the High Predictive block more than all other block conditions (Block x Age-Group: F(3.289, 207.219) = 15.79, p < .001, η2 = .200; see Figure 1). In contrast, cue-utilisation for 5-6-year-olds did not differ between blocks. Contrary to expectations, all age-groups were unable to benefit from using proactive control to ignore the salient distracter (F(4, 252) = 0.70, p = .595, η2 = 0.011). Moreover, we found that age moderates the relationship between the ability to maintain a cue and the ability to inhibit a salient distracter, when measured independently (R2= .146; F(5, 123) = 4.21, p = 0.001). Better ability to maintain a cue was related to poorer inhibition in 5-6-year-olds (r = .40) but not in 9-11-year-olds (r = -.09) and adults (r = -.07).
The findings show that adult-like proactive control has developed by midchildhood but that this may be insufficient for reducing attentional capture, even in adults. Our findings add support to previous findings that 5-6 years is a transition period for developing proactive control (Munakata et al., 2012). Moreover, our moderation analysis indicates that proactive control in this age group may come at a cost (Blackwell & Munakata, 2014): maintaining task goals may have increased the load on 5-6-year-olds’ limited cognitive capacities, making inhibiting eye-catching information difficult.

Authors

• Rumandeep Kaur Hayre, University of Birmingham
  Presenting Author

• Lucy Cragg, University of Nottingham
  Non-Presenting Author

• Harriet Allen, University of Nottingham
  Non-Presenting Author