The effect of language-based priming of visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children

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

Abstract

The way humans attend to their visual field differs profoundly between individuals and across different cultures. Previous research suggests that people tend to have either an analytic style, with a higher focus on the salient object of a scene, or a holistic style, characterized by higher attention to a scene’s contextual information (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). In this context, an important question to consider is when and how these differences emerge during childhood. Empirical studies have shown that culture-specific attention styles gradually emerge between 4 to 9 years of age (Duffy et al., 2009; Imada et al., 2013). In these studies, a general assumption has been that attention styles are socialized in social interactions during childhood, in which language, as a central element of culture, is supposed to play an important role. This is supported by first evidence indicating that the way in which primary caregivers verbally guide children’s attention differs across cultures (Senzaki & Shimizu, 2020; Senzaki et al., 2016) and that parents’ verbal descriptions are associated with their children’s verbal accounts (Köster & Kärtner, 2018). However, not much work has focused on the specific link between language and the way of perceiving the world.
To shed light on the proximal mechanisms underlying this differential development, the present experimental study aims at investigating one potential causal factor that may shape habitualized ways of perceiving the world, namely language-based attention guidance. More specifically, we used a priming approach to examine whether children’s attention styles can be manipulated by language-based primes that either accentuate analytic (i.e. object-focused) or holistic (i.e., context-sensitive) processing. Four- to 9-year-old children (N = 124) from Münster in urban Germany participated in one of two conditions. In each condition, a series of pictures was presented with a pre-recorded verbal description that focused either on the object (analytic condition) or on the context (holistic condition). Effects were measured by three different tasks: an eye-tracking task, a picture description task and a forced-choice recognition task. For each task, the relative focus on the salient object when looking at, describing, and remembering details of the pictures was computed. Results indicate that language-based priming is effective in guiding children’s gaze behavior in the eye-tracking task and in influencing their verbal accounts in the picture description task, but it does not influence the way in which visual scenes are remembered in the forced-choice recognition task (Fig. 1). Furthermore, there was no effect of age as children across all age groups were equally sensitive to language cues. This suggests that verbal attention guidance has a continuous effect on the attention pattern of children aged 4 to 9 years.
In concert with previous cross-cultural (Imada et al., 2013; Senzaki & Shimizu, 2020) and correlational studies (Köster & Kärtner, 2018; Senzaki et al., 2016), this study provides convergent evidence for the assumption that language-based attention guidance significantly contributes to the emergence of inter-individual and cross-cultural differences in visual perception.

Authors

• Solveig Jurkat, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
  Presenting Author

• Marius Gruber, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
  Non-Presenting Author

• Joscha Kärtner, University of Münser
  Non-Presenting Author