The Dynamics of Attention Capture and Recovery Between Childhood and Early Adulthood

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

Abstract

A large body of research has investigated how salient distractions capture attention in adults. However, comparatively few studies have investigated attention capture in children (for a review, Gaspelin, Margett-Jordan, & Ruthruff, 2015). The existing developmental data generally indicate that attention capture effects decrease between early childhood and adulthood, with age-related differences often interpreted to reflect a developing ability to avoid capture by salient distractions. However, recent research indicates that children and adults experience attention capture to similar degrees, with age-related differences in performance reflecting improvements in the ability to recover from – rather than avoid – capture (Erb, Moher, & Marcovitch, 2022). Erb et al. used a technique known as reach tracking to investigate how the impacts of attention capture are reflected in participants’ hand movements as they reached to touch a response target on a digital display. Although the researchers observed robust age-related reductions in the effect of attention capture in participants’ movement times (the time elapsed between movement initiation and response completion), they observed no age-related differences in the effect of attention capture observed in movement trajectories, indicating that children and adults were “pulled” toward the distractor to equivalent degrees but older children and adults better compensated for this capture effect by moving toward the correct target more rapidly.

The current study builds on this prior work by investigating whether age-related differences in capture effects emerge in movement trajectories when the difficulty of the visual search task is increased. Ninety participants completed the study, with 30 participants in each of three age groups: 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and young adults. Participants completed an attention capture task in which four images were presented on a digital display. On each trial, one of the images was a different shape than the other images (e.g., one diamond and three circles). Participants were instructed to touch the unique shape (the target) on each trial, with the shape and location of the target randomized across trials. On distractor-absent trials, all four images were presented in the same color (green or red). On distractor-present trials, one of the non-target images (the distractor) was presented in a different color than the other three images (see Figure 1).

Consistent with previous work, movement times revealed a significant interaction between Age and Distractor Type (absent vs. present), F(2, 87) = 11.93, p < .001, ηp² = .22, with significantly larger capture effects observed in 5- and 9-year-olds than in adults (see Figure 2). Movement trajectories revealed a smaller but significant interaction between Age and Distractor Type, F(2, 87) = 4.37, p = .016, ηp² = .09, with a significantly larger capture effect in 9-year-olds than in 5-year-olds and adults. Taken together, these results provide further evidence that movement times and movement trajectories present distinct patterns of age-related change, with movement times revealing robust age-related gains in the ability to recover from capture and movement trajectories revealing age-related differences in the strength of attention capture. The results underscore the importance of integrating continuous measures of behavior into developmental research.

Authors

• Christopher D Erb, University of Auckland
  Presenting Author

• Jeff Moher, Connecticut College