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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Adaptive behavior requires the ability to allocate attention selectively. This process is supported by an ability to recognize and utilize cues that reliably direct attention to task-relevant information. For example, a child might learn that the motion of an overhand (as opposed to an underhand) throw reliably predicts that more focused attention is needed to catch a ball. Selective attention is further supported by an ability to avoid or recover from attention capture wherein salient but task-irrelevant information impairs one’s ability to attend to task-relevant information. For example, a child preparing to catch a ball might be momentarily distracted by a friend calling their name. This symposium presents four papers investigating how selective attention develops across childhood in tasks targeting the effects of cueing (Papers 1 and 2) and attention capture (Papers 3 and 4). Paper 1 investigates how children use cues to prepare for a future event by manipulating how reliably a cue predicts the location of an upcoming target. Paper 2 uses a retrospective cueing task to investigate the extent to which age-related gains in visual working memory reflect an enhanced ability to direct attention toward internal representations of recently encountered information. Paper 3 demonstrates that certain social stimuli (a caregiver’s face) are more likely to capture children’s attention than other social stimuli (own- versus other-race faces). Finally, paper 4 investigates whether age-related reductions in attention capture reflect improvements in either the ability to avoid capture altogether or the ability to recover from capture after it occurs.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Julie Markant, Tulane University

Individual Presentations

• Stable Endogenous Orienting From Early to Midchildhood in Cued Visual Search When no Distractors are Present - Presenting Author: Rumandeep Kaur Hayre, University of Birmingham; Lucy Cragg, University of Nottingham; Harriet Allen, University of Nottingham

• Contributions of Retrospective Attentional Control to Visual Working Memory Performance: Insights From the Developing Cognitive System - Presenting Author: Andria Shimi, University of Cyprus

• Social Reward Uniquely Biases Children’s Attention Orienting to Faces - Presenting Author: Brianna Hunter, University of California - Davis; Julie Markant, Tulane University

• The Dynamics of Attention Capture and Recovery Between Childhood and Early Adulthood - Presenting Author: Christopher D Erb, University of Auckland; Jeff Moher, Connecticut College