Examining the Developmental Relationship Between Visual Processing and Visual Selective Attention

• In Event: Attention and memory in infants and children

Abstract

Visual selective attention (VSA) improves across childhood. Children’s conjunction visual search abilities become less influenced by distractors with age (Donnelly et al., 2007; Trick & Enns, 1998). Recent work has demonstrated that VSA performance depends on which feature conjunctions require children’s attention (Blinded, 2020). Visual search abilities for feature conjunctions thought to be coded within the dorsal visual pathway may develop earlier than search abilities for conjunctions coded across both the dorsal and ventral visual pathways. These behavioral changes in VSA abilities coincide with developmental changes in the functional integration between the dorsal and ventral visual pathways (Blinded, under review) and for improvement in both color and luminance contrast sensitivity (Knoblauch et al., 2001; Leat et al., 2009). Yet, it remains unclear whether improvements in visual processing, per se, support improvements in VSA across childhood.
Our goal was to better understand the developmental relationship between visual processing, visual feature integration, and visual selective attention performance. To this end, 92 4- to 9-year-old children completed a battery of psychophysical and visual search tasks. Children first completed a contrast sensitivity task for both color and luminance features. Then they completed multiple visual search tasks where they searched for a color or luminance-defined circle. During the visual search tasks, children saw trials with and without simultaneous distractors to parse VSA and visual feature integration, respectively. During a pop-out search task, children saw trials in which stimuli were static or in-motion. Critically, motion information was irrelevant to children’s goal and thus was incidentally integrated with either color or luminance information. This contrasts with a conjunction search task in which children searched for a vertically moving color or luminance-defined circle and motion was thus relevant to their goal. Thus, in the conjunction search task children must deliberately integrate motion information with either color or luminance information. By obtaining each of these measures for each child, we were able to examine 1) whether visual feature processing and integration influences VSA across childhood, and 2) whether this relationship differs between these two feature combinations (e.g., color-motion, luminance-motion).
Consistent with previous work, we found that contrast sensitivity and pop-out search performance improved with age for both color and luminance features. In line with our predictions, we found distinct developmental changes in color-motion integration, depending on whether this feature information was incidentally or deliberately integrated. Specifically, color-motion incidental integration improved across childhood, but color-motion deliberate integration worsened with age. We also found that, VSA for color-motion improves across childhood, but VSA for luminance-motion remains stable. Interestingly, relative to luminance-motion integration, better deliberate color-motion integration, but not color contrast sensitivity is associated with VSA for color-motion. Taken together these findings show that, above and beyond age and visual processing abilities, feature combinations may differentially impact feature integration which may then influence VSA accordingly across childhood.

Authors

• Andrew C. Lynn, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• John Maule, University of Sussex
  Non-Presenting Author

• Dima Amso, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author