What's that? How Visual Distraction May Help, or Hinder, Infants' and Children's Memory

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Attention and memory are heavily intertwined. Goal-directed attentional processes allow us to focus on important aspects of our environment, determined by the goal at hand, in order to remember them when needed, at a future time. In addition, previous experience with an environment can help guide our attentional resources towards items that have been important or useful in the past, or towards items that have changed. Given that attention and memory are connected and both continue to develop throughout childhood, any theory on the development of attention or memory should account for these reciprocal influences. The aim of this international symposium is to advance our understanding of attention-memory interactions from infancy into adulthood (ages 10 months - 9 years; young adults), by examining aspects of continuity and change during this developmental period. Specifically, we focused on how directing attention towards or away from memory targets would influence retention. Paper 1 examines whether guiding one’s attention to internal memory representations impacts visual working memory abilities differently in children compared to young adults. Paper 2 complements Paper 1 by highlighting that guiding toddlers’ attention away from a novel item supports visual exploration of test probes and memory accuracy. Paper 3 examines memory-guided attention in children using a naturalistic visual search experimental paradigm. Paper 4 complements Paper 3 by examining how real-world noise impacts infants’ attention and statistical learning abilities. Together, these papers provide new insight into the development of attention-memory interactions both in the laboratory and in the real world.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chairs

• Sarah Leckey, University of California - Davis

• Simona Ghetti, University of California - Davis

Individual Presentations

• The Role of Attentional Guidance in Visual Working Memory Precision Development - Presenting Author: Andria Shimi, University of Cyprus; Non-Presenting Author: Gaia Scerif, University of Oxford

• The Benefit of Visual Exploration on Toddlers' Memory Accuracy - Presenting Author: Sarah Leckey, University of California - Davis; Non-Presenting Author: Simona Ghetti, University of California - Davis

• Using Computational Analysis of Behavior to Discover Memory-Guided Attention Mechanisms During Naturalistic Visual Seach in Childhood - Presenting Author: Dima Amso, Columbia University; Non-Presenting Author: Lakshmi Govindarajan, Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: Thomas Serre, Brown University

• The Interplay between Attention and the Environment - Presenting Author: Natasha Kirkham, Birkbeck University of London; Non-Presenting Author: Brittney Chere, Birkbeck University of London