Poster #3 - Can children be researchers? An unsupervised online assessment of visual spatial attention

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

Introduction: Attention develops rapidly in infancy, but continues to develop throughout childhood. Lab based cued attention tasks have been vital to our current understanding of attentional development (Hood & Atkinson, 1993; Posner & Petersen, 1990). Unfortunately, the recent Covid-19 pandemic closed many research labs forcing researchers to find innovative methods to continue their research. One solution has been to use online versions of lab-based tasks (Ross-Sheehy et al., 2021). These approaches may be completed without an experimenter, and have the potential to produce larger more diverse samples. The current project used this approach to examine attentional development in 4- to 10-year-old children.
Methods: 290 children between the ages of 4 and 10 were invited to complete an online version of the IOWA task (Ross-Sheehy et al., 2017, 2015). Parents served as experimenters, and instructed their child to press the spacebar every time they saw the smiley face (central fixation; Figure 1, Panel A). Once they did, the smiley face disappeared, and they were presented with a 100ms attention cue (small black dot + tone, presented left or right of center), followed by a 100ms delay, and finally the presentation of a target (colorful image). The location of the attention precue varied, either appearing in the same location as the target (valid cue), the opposite side from the target (invalid cue) or on both sides (double cue). Two additional conditions were used as baseline measures (tone only cue, and no cue; Figure 1, Panel B). Participants then used a touchscreen/keyboard to indicate the side of the target as quickly as possible. Accuracy and response time (RT) across cue conditions were then used to create 4 attention scores that assessed four key aspects of attentional orienting: Mean RT, Facilitation (proportion speed increase for valid cue relative to baseline), Interference (proportion of speed decrement for invalid cue relative to baseline) and Error (mean error across invalid and double cue conditions, see Ross-Sheehy, et al., 2015).
Results: Developmental differences were analyzed using separate one-way ANOVAS for each attention score. Results revealed significantly faster Mean RT, F(6,283)=46.645, p<.001, and significantly lower Error, F(6,283)=3.668, p=.002 with increasing age (Figure 2, Panels A and B). Interestingly, neither Facilitation nor Interference scores varied with age (p=.349 and .625, respectively), suggesting despite continuous improvements in speed and accuracy, covert attention is largely developed by 4-years-of-age. An examination of the means presented in Figure 2 reveal the bulk of these RT improvements occur between 4 and 7-years-of-age. However, these improvements in speed did not appear to increase error rates. Taken together these findings demonstrate attention-based responding continues to improve between 4 and 10 years of age, particularly as it pertains to speed and accuracy. Results further demonstrate that touch responses demonstrate similar attention effects as visual cued attention tasks, and manifest even in at-home environments. Several additional analyses are planned for the full report, including assessment of in-home factors (time of day, screen size, touch or keyboard, etc.), additional attention measures, and individual differences in response time and accuracy for each condition.

Authors

• Esther Reynolds, University of Tennessee - Knoxville
  Presenting Author

• Victoria Jones, University of Tennessee - Knoxville

• Micalee Anne Segers, University of Tennessee - Knoxville

• Shannon Ross-Sheehy, University of Tennessee - Knoxville