Stable Endogenous Orienting From Early to Midchildhood in Cued Visual Search When no Distractors are Present

• In Event: Cueing and Capture: How Children Develop the Ability to Direct and Redirect Attention

Abstract

The ability to intentionally orient attention is known to gradually develop during childhood. Endogenous (or top-down, proactive) orienting allows children to maintain information at an early stage of processing to selectively focus their attention and reduce the likelihood of distraction. The period that endogenous orienting develops is debated, as is the limits of this skill during early (5-6 years) and midchildhood (9-11 years; Lewis, Reeve & Johnson, 2016). The current study aimed to understand whether endogenous orienting is present during early childhood and explore the influence of a salient distracter.

111 participants from two age-groups (5-6- & 9-11 years) completed a child-adapted cued visual search task. Participants searched for a tilted line target which was displayed within one of three coloured circles. Prior to this, a colour cue was presented which guided attention either towards the target (valid cue: e.g. pink cue, target in pink circle), away from the target (invalid cue: pink cue, target in green circle) or did not guide attention (neutral cue: pink cue, pink circle not present in the search-display, target in blue circle). Participants completed three conditions where the cue was 1) Always Predictive (100% valid cues), 2) Mostly Predictive (66.67% valid, 33.33% invalid cues) and 3) Baseline (100% neutral cues). If endogenous attentional orienting is present in early childhood, we predicted cue-use (faster on valid trials vs invalid & neutral trials) in the Always Predictive and Mostly Predictive blocks, relative to the Baseline block, in both age groups.

We found that 5-6- and 9-11-year-olds could utilise the cues as effectively as one another (Block x Age-Group non-significant: F(1.81, 197.29)=.86, p=.414, ηp2=.20; see Figure 1). Indeed, both age-groups were faster on valid trials in the Always Predictive and Mostly Predictive blocks, relative to the Baseline block (both ps <.01). They were also slower on invalid trials relative to valid trials in the Mostly Predictive block and the Baseline block (both ps<.001), respectively. We compared performance in the current study to work with the same experimental paradigm but with a singleton distracter. This showed that 5-6-year-olds had better cue-use in the Mostly Predictive block without a distracter relative to when a distracter was present (t(96)=2.19, p=.031, d=.44) but there was no difference in 9-11-year-olds (t(98)=.50, p=.619, d=.10).

The findings suggest that endogenous orienting is present in early childhood (5-6 years) and stays relatively stable into midchildhood (9-11 years). Our results add to existing theories in suggesting that the transition from mostly using exogenous orienting to mostly using endogenous orienting may occur prior to ages five and six (Munakata et al., 2012). In addition, the current findings suggest that endogenous orienting in 5-6-year-olds is better when there are no salient distractions to impede on attention. This is indicative of 5-6-year-olds’ impaired ability to filter irrelevant information. Overall, children as young as five are able to utilise early information to endogenously orient their attention but this skill may be vulnerable to distraction at this stage of development.

Authors

• Rumandeep Kaur Hayre, University of Birmingham
  Presenting Author

• Lucy Cragg, University of Nottingham

• Harriet Allen, University of Nottingham