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STEVENS’ HANDBOOK OFEXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGYAND COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

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STEVENS’ HANDBOOK OFEXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGYAND COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCEFOURTH EDITION

Volume 4Developmental & Social Psychology

Editor-in-Chief

JOHN T. WIXTED

Volume Editor

SIMONA GHETTI

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. ∞

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Copyright © 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the combined volume as follows:

Name: Wixted, John T., editor.Title: Stevens’ handbook of experimental psychology and cognitive

neuroscience / by John T. Wixted (Editor-in-chief).Other titles: Handbook of experimental psychology.Description: Fourth edition. | New York : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2018] |

Includes index. Contents: Volume 1. Learning and memory – Volume 2.Sensation, perception, and attention – Volume 3. Language & thought –Volume 4. Developmental & social psychology – Volume 5. Methodology.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017032691 | ISBN 9781119170013 (cloth : vol. 1) |ISBN 9781119170037 (epdf : vol. 1) | ISBN 9781119170020 (epub : vol. 1) |ISBN 9781119170044 (cloth : vol. 2) | ISBN 9781119174158 (epdf : vol. 2) |ISBN 9781119174073 (epub : vol. 2) | ISBN 9781119170693 (cloth : vol. 3) |ISBN 9781119170730 (epdf : vol. 3) | ISBN 9781119170716 (epub : vol. 3) |ISBN 9781119170051 (cloth : vol. 4) | ISBN 9781119170068 (epdf : vol. 4) |ISBN 9781119170082 (epub : vol. 4) | ISBN 9781119170129 (cloth : vol. 5) |ISBN 9781119170150 (epdf : vol. 5) | ISBN 9781119170143 (epub : vol. 5)Subjects: LCSH: Psychology, Experimental. | Cognitive neuroscience.Classification: LCC BF181 .H336 2018 | DDC 150—dc23 LC record available athttps://lccn.loc.gov/2017032691

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Contributors

Dima AmsoBrown University

Jennifer S. BeerUniversity of Texas at Austin

Steven T. BengalOhio State University

Lindsay C. BowmanUniversity of California, Davis

Laura Martin BraunsteinColumbia University

Jeffrey A. BrooksNew York University

Christine CoughlinUniversity of California, Davis

Eveline A. CroneUniversiteit Leiden Faculteit SocialeWetenschappen, Leiden, Zuid-Holland

Audun DahlUniversity of California, Santa Cruz

Mauricio R. DelgadoRutgers University Newark College of Artsand Sciences

Jonathan B. FreemanNew York University

Amber M. GaffneyHumboldt State University

Bertram GawronskiUniversity of Texas at Austin

Simona GhettiUniversity of California, Davis

Jeremy D. GrettonOhio State University

Adam HahnUniversity of Cologne, Koeln, Germany

Cindy Harmon-JonesThe University of New South Wales

Eddie Harmon-JonesThe University of New South Wales

Paul HastingsUniversity of California, Davis

Michael A. HoggClaremont Graduate University

Teresa IuculanoStanford University

Melanie KillenUniversity of Maryland

David KlahrCarnegie Mellon University

Jessica E. KoskiUniversity of Texas at Austin

Sarah LeckeyUniversity of California, Davis

Jeffrey LidzUniversity of Maryland at College Park

Vinod MenonStanford University

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vi Contributors

Lisa OakesUniversity of California, Davis

Kevin N. OchsnerColumbia University

Koraly Pérez-EdgarPennsylvania State University

Laurel PerkinsUniversity of Maryland at College Park

Tom F. PriceArmy Research Laboratory, Adelphi,Maryland

Anastasia E. RigneyUniversity of Texas at Austin

Mark A. SabbaghQueen’s University

Vladimir M. SloutskyOhio State University

Megan E. SpeerRutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences

Duane T. WegenerOhio State University

Kiki ZanolieInstitute of Psychology, Leiden University,Leiden, The Netherlands

Corinne ZimmermanIllinois State University

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Contents

PREFACE ix

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

1 DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL ATTENTION 3Lisa Oakes and Dima Amso

2 CATEGORY LEARNING AND CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT 37Vladimir M. Sloutsky

3 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 83Jeffrey Lidz and Laurel Perkins

4 DEVELOPMENT OF EPISODIC MEMORY: PROCESSESAND IMPLICATIONS 133Christine Coughlin, Sarah Leckey, and Simona Ghetti

5 DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITIVE CONTROL ACROSS CHILDHOODAND ADOLESCENCE 159Kiki Zanolie and Eveline A. Crone

6 DEVELOPMENT OF MATHEMATICAL REASONING 183Teresa Iuculano and Vinod Menon

7 DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC THINKING 223Corinne Zimmerman and David Klahr

8 THEORY OF MIND 249Mark A. Sabbagh and Lindsay C. Bowman

9 EMOTION DEVELOPMENT FROM AN EXPERIMENTALAND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES LENS 289Koraly Pérez-Edgar and Paul Hastings

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viii Contents

10 MORAL REASONING: THEORY AND RESEARCHIN DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE 323Audun Dahl and Melanie Killen

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

11 ATTITUDES 357Steven T. Bengal, Jeremy D. Gretton, and Duane T. Wegener

12 IMPLICIT SOCIAL COGNITION 395Adam Hahn and Bertram Gawronski

13 PSYCHOLOGY AND NEUROSCIENCE OF PERSON PERCEPTION 429Jeffrey A. Brooks and Jonathan B. Freeman

14 GROUP PROCESSES AND INTERGROUP RELATIONS 465Michael A. Hogg and Amber M. Gaffney

15 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT EMOTION REGULATION 499Laura Martin Braunstein and Kevin N. Ochsner

16 SELF-EVALUATION 529Jennifer S. Beer, Anastasia E. Rigney, and Jessica E. Koski

17 MOTIVATION 559Eddie Harmon-Jones, Tom F. Price, and Cindy Harmon-Jones

18 EMOTION–COGNITION INTERACTIONS IN MEMORYAND DECISION MAKING 591Megan E. Speer and Mauricio R. Delgado

Author Index 617

Subject Index 645

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Preface

Since the first edition was published in 1951,The Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psy-chology has been recognized as the standardreference in the experimental psychologyfield. The most recent (third) edition of thehandbook was published in 2004, and it wasa success by any measure. But the field ofexperimental psychology has changed in dra-matic ways since then. Throughout the firstthree editions of the handbook, the changes inthe field were mainly quantitative in nature.That is, the size and scope of the field grewsteadily from 1951 to 2004, a trend that wasreflected in the growing size of the handbookitself: the one-volume first edition (1951) wassucceeded by a two-volume second edition(1988) and then by a four-volume third edi-tion (2004). Since 2004, however, this still-growing field has also changed qualitativelyin the sense that, in virtually every subdomainof experimental psychology, theories of themind have evolved to include theories ofthe brain. Research methods in experimen-tal psychology have changed accordinglyand now include not only venerable EEGrecordings (long a staple of research in psy-cholinguistics) but also MEG, fMRI, TMS,and single-unit recording. The trend towardneuroscience is an absolutely dramatic,worldwide phenomenon that is unlikely everto be reversed. Thus, the era of purely behav-ioral experimental psychology is already longgone, even though not everyone has noticed.

Experimental psychology and cognitiveneuroscience (an umbrella term that, asused here, includes behavioral neuroscience,social neuroscience, and developmental neu-roscience) are now inextricably intertwined.Nearly every major psychology departmentin the country has added cognitive neurosci-entists to its ranks in recent years, and thattrend is still growing. A viable handbook ofexperimental psychology should reflect thenew reality on the ground.

There is no handbook in existence todaythat combines basic experimental psychol-ogy and cognitive neuroscience, despite thefact that the two fields are interrelated—andeven interdependent—because they are con-cerned with the same issues (e.g., memory,perception, language, development, etc.).Almost all neuroscience-oriented researchtakes as its starting point what has beenlearned using behavioral methods in exper-imental psychology. In addition, nowadays,psychological theories increasingly take intoaccount what has been learned about thebrain (e.g., psychological models increas-ingly need to be neurologically plausible).These considerations explain why I chosea new title for the handbook: The Stevens’Handbook of Experimental Psychology andCognitive Neuroscience. This title serves asa reminder that the two fields go togetherand as an announcement that the Stevens’Handbook now covers it all.

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x Preface

The fourth edition of the Stevens’ Hand-book is a five-volume set structured asfollows:

1. Learning & Memory: Elizabeth A.Phelps and Lila Davachi (volume editors)

Topics include fear learning, time per-ception, working memory, visual objectrecognition, memory and future imag-ining, sleep and memory, emotion andmemory, attention and memory, motiva-tion and memory, inhibition in memory,education and memory, aging and mem-ory, autobiographical memory, eyewitnessmemory, and category learning.

2. Sensation, Perception, & Attention:John T. Serences (volume editor)

Topics include attention; vision; colorvision; visual search; depth perception;taste; touch; olfaction; motor control; per-ceptual learning; audition; music percep-tion; multisensory integration; vestibular,proprioceptive, and haptic contributionsto spatial orientation; motion perception;perceptual rhythms; the interface theoryof perception; perceptual organization;perception and interactive technology;and perception for action.

3. Language & Thought: Sharon L.Thompson-Schill (volume editor)

Topics include reading, discourse anddialogue, speech production, sentenceprocessing, bilingualism, concepts andcategorization, culture and cognition,embodied cognition, creativity, reasoning,speech perception, spatial cognition, wordprocessing, semantic memory, and moralreasoning.

4. Developmental & Social Psychology:Simona Ghetti (volume editor)

Topics include development of visualattention, self-evaluation, moral devel-

opment, emotion-cognition interactions,person perception, memory, implicitsocial cognition, motivation group pro-cesses, development of scientific thinking,language acquisition, category and con-ceptual development, development ofmathematical reasoning, emotion regula-tion, emotional development, developmentof theory of mind, attitudes, and executivefunction.

5. Methodology: Eric-Jan Wagenmakers(volume editor)

Topics include hypothesis testing andstatistical inference, model comparisonin psychology, mathematical modelingin cognition and cognitive neuroscience,methods and models in categorization,serial versus parallel processing, theoriesfor discriminating signal from noise,Bayesian cognitive modeling, responsetime modeling, neural networks andneurocomputational modeling, methodsin psychophysics analyzing neural timeseries data, convergent methods ofmemory research, models and methodsfor reinforcement learning, culturalconsensus theory, network models forclinical psychology, the stop-signalparadigm, fMRI, neural recordings, andopen science.

How the field of experimental psychologywill evolve in the years to come is anyone’sguess, but the Stevens’ Handbook providesa comprehensive overview of where itstands today. For anyone in search ofinteresting and important topics to pursuein future research, this is the place to start.After all, you have to figure out the direc-tion in which the river of knowledge iscurrently flowing to have any hope of everchanging it.

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DEVELOPMENTALPSYCHOLOGY

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CHAPTER 1

Development of Visual Attention

LISA OAKES AND DIMA AMSO

INTRODUCTION

Consider a child searching a crowded roomfor her parent. Perhaps there are severalpeople in the room as well as furniture, toys,and other objects. In addition, there maybe decorations on the wall, light fixtureshanging from the ceiling, windows, curtains,and so on. Visual attention is the set ofprocesses that allows the child to filter theoverly cluttered visual world, selecting someavailable information to process—in thiscase the people—and inhibiting other avail-able information—in this case the furniture,light fixtures, and curtains. These attentionalprocesses are governed by a complex set ofinteracting neural systems that develop overinfancy and childhood.

In what follows, we provide formal def-initions of those visual attention processesthat are most relevant to infants and children.Next, we describe influential models andtasks of visual attention. Then we discusswhat is known about the development ofattentional processes during infancy, earlychildhood, and later childhood and beyond.We describe historical work examininglooking behavior as a measure of visualattention, which provides a foundation forour understanding of the development ofvisual attention across childhood. We alsodiscuss more contemporary work using more

standard visual attention tasks, often adaptedfrom work with adults. Throughout, wediscuss the paradigms that have been usedto assess visual attention in infancy andchildhood, including a discussion of whatspecific computations or processes of visualattention each assesses. Finally, we examinehow visual attention processes (and theirdevelopment) interact with other cognitiveand perceptual systems such as memoryand learning, how novel neuroimaging toolsadd insight into neural systems develop-ment underlying visual attention, and futuredirections in visual attention research.

BACKGROUND ISSUES

Defining Visual Attention

Defining attention is not trivial. In part, thisis because many meanings of the term “at-tention” are intuitive—we know that childrenwho are paying attention are quiet, looking atthe thing they are paying attention to, and notdoing something else. We know that childrenwho have problems with attention have diffi-culty staying on task and are easily distractedby thoughts, tasks, or stimuli in their environ-ment. We command others to “pay attention,”and we talk informally about the inability tomaintain attention (e.g., “spacing out”).

However, the scientific study of the devel-opment of attention requires a more formal

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4 Development of Visual Attention

and precise definition. As the example justdescribed illustrates, attention is necessaryin contexts of information overload. Withoutattention, it would be impossible to bindfeatures of visual objects (such as color andshape) (Treisman, 1998), overcome limitedvisual working memory capacity (Awh,Vogel, & Oh, 2006), or process a signaleffectively in a noisy context (Carrasco,2014). Luck and Vecera (2002) offer aprocess-oriented definition of attention thatstates that (1) attention is the selection ofinformation among alternatives, and (2) thisselection improves the effectiveness of men-tal processes. Visual attention, therefore,allows us to select information from thevisual environment for further processingwhile simultaneously ignoring or inhibitingcompeting information that is not selected.The point is that when defining the term“attention,” we can focus on the functionof attention. By engaging in selection andinhibition, visual attention turns up the gainon some items and locations for subsequentgoal-relevant action, perception, and memory(Carrasco, 2011, 2014; Markant, Worden, &Amso, 2015; Zhang et al., 2011).

Note, however, that this definition ofattention does not restrict attention to a singlemodality or level of processing. Our taskhere, however, is to describe the developmentof visual attention. It is important to recog-nize that even behavior that we would clearlyconsider visual attention—for example,directing fixation or processing resources toan aspect of the visual environment—is afunction of many processes, only some ofwhich are solely visual. General level ofarousal, for example, may influence thedepth of one’s attentional engagement. Vol-untary control over head and eye movementswill contribute to overt direction of visualattention. And high-level processes, suchas establishing goals, prioritizing eventsand stimuli in terms of their relevance, and

applying existing knowledge to a currentsituation, will influence visual attention. Assuch, visual attention does not operate inisolation. Recognizing these connections andevaluating the literature with an understand-ing of the possible roles of multiple factorsand processes on visual attention can enableus to attain deep understanding of visualattention and its development.

It is also important to recognize thatvisual attention is a set of computationsor processes rather than a skill or contentdomain. A formal and precise definitionof attention requires consideration of thestructures and mechanisms that supportthese processes and functions. An importantframework for understanding visual atten-tion is Posner and Petersen’s (Petersen &Posner, 2012; Posner & Petersen, 1990)classic model. This model describes threeaspects of attention—alerting, orienting, andexecutive attention—that are supported bydifferent neural networks (Fan, McCand-liss, Fossella, Flombaum, & Posner, 2005;Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner,2002; Posner & Petersen, 1990). Each ofthese aspects of attention applies to specificaspects of visual attention. The alertingresponse, supported by thalamic involve-ment, is a phasic attentional readiness andis a prepared response to a warning (a toneprepares runners for the official start of arace) stimulus. A related sustained attentionmechanism involves a more continuous focuson a particular task or stimulus. The orientingmechanism involves shifting attention to anitem or a location either with an overt eyemovement or covertly, without a physicaleye movement. Visual attention orientingrecruits a parietal network. The executiveattention mechanism is involved in switching,inhibiting, and general top-down control ofvisual attention, and it involves frontoparietalcortices and the anterior cingulate cortex.Clearly, each of these attention functions


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Background Issues 5

also is influenced by and relies on otherprocesses.

For example, motor development andoculomotor development are extremely rel-evant to the development of visual attentionprocesses. Overt attention, which in someways is the most straightforward and obviousexample of visual attention, involves turningone’s head and eyes to bring a stimulus,object, or feature of the environment intofocus. Overt attention thus relies on the phys-ical abilities involved in holding one’s headupright, making effortful and voluntary headturns, and voluntarily controlling eye move-ments. Motor control over the head and eyesundergoes significant developmental changein infancy (Bertenthal & Von Hofsten, 1998;Canfield & Kirkham, 2001; von Hofsten,2004), which opens up novel exploratoryand attentional strategies for young infants(Gibson, 1988).

Moreover, there are many similaritiesbetween visual attention and related generalattention processes as well as attention thatoperates over other sensory modalities, suchas auditory attention. For example, regardlessof the modality, attention involves selectionof relevant stimuli and inhibition of distrac-tors. In addition, attention as used in onemodality may in fact influence attention inother modalities. Amso et al. (2014) arguedthat the development of visual attentionmay depend on the development of visualprocessing (see also Amso & Scerif, 2015).Smith and Trainor (2011) made a similarargument with respect to auditory selectiveattention: specifically that auditory selec-tive attention in infants depends on infants’ability to perceptually process target andnontarget sounds. Direct data comparing thedevelopmental trajectories of these processesis sparse. One recent study (Günther et al.,2014) compared visual and auditory selectiveattention processes in a group of participants7 to 77 years on a focused-attention task. The

authors found that participants were betterin the visual than in the auditory conditions,but the modality effect diminished withage. These data suggest different develop-mental trajectories for visual and auditoryattention. We highlight these similaritiesand differences to point out that althoughunderstanding visual attention is relevantto the study of auditory attention, the twoprocesses have distinct and nontransferabledevelopmental trajectories.

Influential Models and Common Tasks

Most views of attention derive from theinfluential model of Posner and Petersen(Petersen & Posner, 2012; Posner & Petersen,1990). As described in the previous section,this model describes alerting, orienting, andexecutive attention, all subserved by differ-ent neural structures and all of which havedifferent functions related to the selectionand filtering of relevant information and theinhibition of irrelevant or distracting infor-mation. These attentional processes havebeen widely studied and have been examinedover a wide age range. Thus, many othermodels of attention have focused on similarprocesses.

As an example, consider the four func-tions of attention Colombo (2001) describedin infancy. These four functions are closelyrelated to Posner and Petersen’s attention net-works (Petersen & Posner, 2012; Posner &Petersen, 1990). Specifically, Colombodescribes alertness, spatial orienting, atten-tion to object features, and endogenouscontrol. Here, the term “alertness” refers toPosner and Petersen’s alerting network. Itreflects the ability to both attain as well asmaintain an alert state. The terms “spatialorienting” and “attention to object fea-tures” correspond to Posner and Petersen’sorienting mechanism. Colombo separatedthis network into two functions—one for


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selecting and shifting attention to particularlocations (spatial orienting) and another forselecting and shifting attention to particu-lar types of objects features (perhaps theirshape or color). This differentiation roughlycorresponds to the “what” and “where”visual systems (Ungerleider & Pessosa,2008). Finally, Colombo (2001) describedendogenous attention, which corresponds toPosner and Petersen’s executive attention.For Colombo, this is the ability to volun-tarily direct attention to particular featuresor aspects of the environment as well as theability to inhibit attending to some features oraspects of the environment. These functionscorrespond to top-down control over theother visual attention functions. Therefore,Colombo’s model is specifically directedat explaining attention in infancy, but thecomponents and functions of attention areclearly closely tied to the classic Posner andPetersen conception of attention networks.

The tasks commonly used to assess visualattention are designed to index the visualattention processes and networks describedin the Posner and Petersen model (Petersen &Posner, 2012; Posner & Petersen, 1990). Astandard procedure used to study visualattention across populations is the spatialcuing procedure (Posner, 1980). In this gen-eral class of tasks, attention processes areinvoked with a cue. The cue may indicate thata target is about to occur, or it may indicatea potential location of the impending target.For example, Posner and colleagues devel-oped the Attention Network Test (ANT) (Fanet al., 2002), which includes several typesof trials that use cuing to access alerting,orienting, and executive attention networks.Participants are instructed to respond to anidentified target item. To assess alerting, acue warns the participant to prepare for thecoming target but gives no information aboutthe location that the target will occur (e.g., inFigure 1.1a, there are asterisks—or cues—in

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CUE(a)

(b)

TARGET

Figure 1.1 A schematic depiction of the Atten-tion Network Task (ANT) (e.g., Fan et al., 2002). Ineach figure, the cross represents the fixation point,the asterisk is a cue, and the arrow is the target.The figures in (a) illustrate an alerting trial in whichthe asterisks act as a cue and alert the participantto prepare to respond to a target stimulus but pro-vide no information to the location of that target.The figures in (b) illustrate a valid trial in whichthe cue indicates both that a target stimulus willoccur and also the location in which it will occur,offering the participant the opportunity to covertlyorient to that location and prepare a response.

both possible target locations). Thus, thepresence of the cue invokes a phasic alert-ing response in preparation for the targetstimulus but does not provide any usefulinformation about how to selectively director control attention. To assess orienting,the cue also contains information about thelocation where the target stimulus will occur(e.g., in Figure 1.1b, there is only a singleasterisk in the location where the target willlater appear). This type of cue allows theparticipant to prepare for a target in a specificlocation, perhaps “covertly,” or without aneye movement, shifting attention to the cuedlocation in anticipation of the emergence ofthe target at that location.

Cuing is not the only way in whichresearchers have examined orienting atten-tion. A common task used to understandingorienting is visual search (e.g., Treisman &Gelade, 1980). In such tasks, a target itemis cast in the midst of varying numbers of


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Background Issues 7

(a)

(b)

Figure 1.2 Examples of visual search arrays. In(a) the target is defined by a single feature (color),whereas in (b) the target is defined by the combi-nation of two features (color and shape).Source: Reprinted from Gerhardstein &Rovee-Collier (2002). Copyright (2002) withpermission from Elsevier.

distractors. If the target and distractor varyalong only one feature dimension, as inFigure 1.2a, the target pops out and is consid-ered preattentive (e.g., Treisman & Gelade,1980); that is, the target can be detected andlocated even without the use of attention.One key characteristic of pop-out search isthat increasing the number of distractors inthe display does not result in longer searchtimes to the target. When the target anddistractors share a conjunction of features(Figure 1.2b), in contrast, visual search iseffortful and requires attention. In this case,target identification is made progressivelymore effortful, as indexed by increasing tar-get search times, by increasing the similarity(or competition) between the distractors and

the target, or by increasing the number ofdistractors in the scene (e.g., Treisman &Gelade, 1980), suggesting that participantstake longer to detect the target when theyhave to shift their attention to larger num-bers of items. Variants of visual search havebecome widely used to understand atten-tional processes in infants (Adler, 2005),toddlers (Gerhardstein & Rovee-Collier,2002; Scerif, Cornish, Wilding, Driver, &Karmiloff-Smith, 2004), and children (Don-nelly et al., 2007). Indeed, some work hasexplored changes in attention across the lifespan by examining performance in visualsearch over a wide age range (Trick &Enns, 1998).

Assessment of executive attention requiresthat some perceptual conflict be resolved, andsuch tasks engage midline frontal areas andthe lateral prefrontal cortex (Fan et al., 2002).In the ANT, for example, executive attentionis assessed using a version of the EriksenFlanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974). Inthis task, a target is an arrow presented in thecenter of a display. In the simple version ofthis task, the subject simply has to determinewhether the arrow points to the right or theleft. However, to assess executive attention,trials are presented in which the central arrowis “flanked” by distracting arrows. Figure 1.3illustrates child-friendly versions of this task.In the “Fish” adaptation, for example, thetrials presented on the left do not requireexecutive attention because all the fish pointin the same direction and thus no conflictneeds to be resolved. On the trials presentedon the left of the figure, in contrast, the flank-ing fish point one direction and the centralfish points in the opposite direction. In thiscase, the central target and the flanker are con-flicting. Because the child’s task is to reportthe direction the central fish (or arrow) ispointing, accurately responding in the flankertasks requires inhibiting responding to theflanker fish (arrows) and focusing attention


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Colors Version

Congruent Stimuli Incongruent Stimuli

Shapes Version

Fish Version

Figure 1.3 Examples of flanker tasks forchildren.Source: Reprinted from McDermott, Perez-Edger, & Fox 2007. Copyright 2007 PsychonomicSociety, Inc., with permission of Springer.

on the central fish (arrow). Fan et al. (2005)confirmed that the executive attention portionof the ANT engage different brain regionsfrom the other portions of the ANT and thatthis flanker task engages frontoparietal andanterior cingulate regions generally thoughtto be involved when dealing with conflict. To

better assess young children’s performanceon this task, McDermott, Perez-Edgar, andFox (2007) used the variations presentedin Figure 1.3 (see also Rueda et al., 2004)and demonstrated behavioral effects of theflankers on the performance of childrenbetween 4 and 6 years of age.

In sum, there is a large body of researchpresenting tasks to assess the developmentof attention. These tasks have been stronglyinfluenced by the traditional model of atten-tional networks, originally proposed byPosner and Petersen (Petersen & Posner,2012; Posner & Petersen, 1990). Thesevisual attention tasks have proven to be pow-erful for studying visual attention beginningin infancy and extending to adulthood, asdescribed next.

Development of Attention

Attention in Infancy

Different visual attention processes emergebeginning in infancy. However, our descrip-tion of the ANT task and spatial cuingmore generally should make it clear thatmany aspects or processes of attention areextremely difficult to measure and study ininfancy. As a result, historically, the studyof attention in infancy conflated attentionalprocesses with measures used to index them,including looking times and oculomotorcontrol, making the early study of visualattention in infancy actually the study ofvisual behavior in infancy. Indeed, a largenumber of studies were published in the1960s and 1970s examining models of infantattention, the effect of stimulus propertieson infant attention, and the relation betweeninfant attention and memory.

In the first postnatal weeks, infants havedifficulty initiating and maintaining analert, attentive state, which Colombo (2001)argued is related to the alertness functionof attention. Changes in this function are


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Background Issues 9

related to the amount of time infants are inan awake alert state and reflect noncorticaldevelopmental changes (see Colombo, 2001,for a review). It is plausible that changesin infants’ regulation of their state (e.g.,awake and alert, drowsy, asleep) contributeto alerting as defined by Posner and Petersen(1990). Indeed, Posner and Rothbart andtheir colleagues have argued that behavioralregulation—and executive attention—arerelated developmentally to the alerting andorienting network (Posner & Rothbart, 2009;Sheese, Rothbart, Posner, White, & Fraun-dorf, 2008). But it is difficult to determinehow visual attention versus other more gen-eral aspects of nervous system regulationdetermines how much of the time younginfants spend fixating a stimulus.

Moreover, studies in the 1960s and1970s on infants’ visual attention focusedon stimulus properties that elicit sustainedattention (Fantz & Nevis, 1967). Indeed,this emphasis and body of literature led totheories such as Cohen’s (1973) highly influ-ential two-process theory of infants’ visualattention. Cohen argued that how quicklyyoung infants orient (attention-getting) to astimulus is related to the physical proper-ties of the stimulus (e.g., its size) whereashow long infants continued to look at astimulus (attention-holding) is related toits complexity or how difficult it was forinfants to process, form a memory, and thelike. The relation between visual attentionand aspects of processing or one’s ongo-ing cognitive goals has for decades been afocus of research on visual attention acrossthe life span (Desimone & Duncan, 1995;Folk, Remington, & Johnson, 1992; Lavie,Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004). Thesequestions remain at the forefront of the studyof visual attention. However, as we discusslater, the developmental science communitynow recognizes that they reflect interactionsbetween attention and other psychological

processes rather than solely visual attentionalprocesses.

It is also important to note that the terms“attention” and “looking” historically wereused interchangeably. Although the confla-tion of these constructs is intuitive, lookingtime is not the same as attention. Lookingis a very gross metric of attention per seand likely reflects a conglomeration of otherprocesses, for example, processing or learn-ing rates, memory, and visual preference.Disentangling visual attention and look-ing has been difficult because of a lack ofmeasurement tools. Historically, researcherscould measure only coarse aspects of infants’looking behavior—evaluating the directionof the eyes (and head) to determine whetherinfants looked at a particular image, object,or person, and how long infants continued tolook at an item once fixated. Developmentsin eye tracking (Gredebäck, Johnson, & vonHofsten, 2010) and event-related potential(ERP) methods (Reynolds, Guy, & Zhang,2010; Richards, 2001) have opened newpossibilities for examining infants’ attention.In particular, such methods provide insightinto infants’ covert attention shifting. Forexample, it is now possible to determinewhether infants more quickly fixate a validlycued location than an invalidly cued loca-tion (Markant & Amso, 2015; Ross-Sheehy,Schneegans, & Spencer, 2015). By measur-ing where and how quickly infants orientto an object or location, we can establishwhether infants look more quickly at a targetappearing at a cued location than at atarget appearing at an uncued location, forexample. If this pattern emerges, we con-clude that infants must have shifted theirattention to the cued location before makingan eye movement; thus, such effects provideevidence of covert attentional shifts. Otherwork has examined the neural circuitry sup-porting covert attentional shifts using ERPmethods (Richards, 2000, 2005).


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Richards and colleagues (Richards &Casey, 1992; Richards, 1989) measuredheart rate variability in young infants as aphysiological index of attentional engage-ment during periods of looking. Specifically,Richards and Casey (1992) described heartrate defined phases of attention during peri-ods of sustained looking at dynamic, complexvideo clips (e.g., moving shapes, clips fromSesame Street). Infants’ heart rates undergo apredictable and systematic pattern of changesduring looks to visual stimuli, indicatingchanges in the infants’ level of attentionengagement. Specifically, soon after initiat-ing a fixation of a stimulus, infants’ heartrates begin to decline, indicating that they areentering a state of sustained attention, whereinfants are found to be more resistant to dis-traction. After a period of sustained low heartrate, infants’ heart rates increase and returnto the prestimulus level, indicating sustainedattention termination. These data suggest thatat least by 8 weeks of age, infants’ sustainedfixations actually reflect several phases andthat only some proportion of individual looksreflects the kinds of attentional processesdiscussed in the context of other procedures,at other ages, and so on. Because the stimuliused in this research are complex and oftenmultimodal (e.g., several studies used clipsfrom Sesame Street), we must be cautiousabout concluding that the observed patternsreflect only visual attentional processes; aswith much infant work, the findings mayreflect a combination of visual attentionalprocesses in conjunction with other percep-tual and cognitive processes, such as visualperceptual skill control over eye movements,learning, and memory.

A larger literature has been devoted todevelopmental changes in aspects of lookingbehavior that reflect spatial orientingprocesses. A primary focus has been tounderstand changes in voluntary control

over visual attention in the first 12 postnatalmonths (see Ruff & Rothbart, 1996, for areview). Specifically, several researchershave concluded that attention in very younginfants is stimulus bound, or externallycontrolled (Colombo, 2001); it has evenbeen stated that their attention is obligatory(Stechler & Latz, 1966). These conclusionsare based on the observation that in the firstpostnatal weeks, infants seem to be unable todisengage attention from a fixated stimulusin order to fixate another stimulus. In thegap-overlap task—in which a peripheralstimulus is presented when the infant isfixating a central stimulus— fixations of veryyoung infants’ appear to be sticky. In thistask, infants look at a central stimulus, whichthen disappears and is followed by a periph-eral stimulus to either the left or the rightof center. (See Figure 1.4.) Reaction timesto orient to the peripheral stimulus indicateinfants’ ability to flexibly shift orienting.In overlap trials, the central stimulus—thetarget the infant is fixating—remains visiblewhen the peripheral stimulus is presented.Under these conditions, young infants havesignificant difficulty disengaging from thatcentral stimulus and shifting their fixationto the peripheral target (Hood & Atkinson,1993). Because, as described earlier, lookingbehavior is thought to reflect attention,the conclusion has been that this apparentstickiness arises from infants’ inabilityto voluntarily shift the direction of theirattention.

At about 4 months, there appears to be ashift in this “stickiness” in infants’ lookingbehavior. Smooth pursuit rapidly developsfrom birth to 4 months, and at 4 monthssmooth pursuit dominates visual tracking(Rosander, 2007). In the overlap task justdescribed, infants more easily shift attentionby 4 months (M. H. Johnson, 1995). Recall,however, that our understanding of visualattention in infancy reflects our evaluation of


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Background Issues 11

Gap Trials Overlap Trials

Central Target Central Target

Gap

Peripheral Target Peripheral Target

Overlap

Figure 1.4 A schematic depiction of a gap-overlap task. There are two trial types: Each trial beginswith a central target presented at fixation (the duck here); after some period of time the central targetdisappears and a peripheral target (the black and white bars here) appears. The difference between thetwo types of trials is whether the two targets are presented at the same time (in overlap trials) or separatedby a brief blank screen (in gap trials). Color version of this figure is available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781119170174.

visual behavior. Between birth and 4 monthsof age, there are significant changes in ocu-lomotor control, and as a consequence, at 4months, infants have sufficient control overeye movements such that they are reliableresearch participants. Although there havebeen discussions about the role of attention inoculomotor control (e.g., Theeuwes, Kramer,Hahn, Irwin, & Zelinsky, 1999) and saccadiceye movements (Canfield & Kirkham, 2001;Hoffman & Subramaniam, 1995), there isevidence that even in adults, performanceon some attention tasks requiring eye move-ments involves multiple neural systems anddoes not reflect solely attentional processes.(See, e.g., Csibra, Johnson, & Tucker, 1997.)We therefore must be cautious when draw-ing conclusions about infants’ attentionfrom behavior that taxes oculomotor control(Nakagawa & Sukigara, 2007).

The change at 4 months in infants’ abilityto shift their attention in the overlap taskdoes not mean that this aspect of visual

attention is fully developed. In the secondhalf of the first postnatal year, infants’ abilityto shift attention in this context varies as afunction of the content of the central, fixatedstimulus (Peltola, Leppänen, Palokangas, &Hietanen, 2008). This variation in the secondhalf of the first year perhaps reflects thefact that infants’ processing of the mean-ing or significance of the central stimulusinfluences their ability to detect or respondto a peripheral or distracting stimulus. In avery different context, Oakes and colleagues(2002) observed that when playing withtoys, 10-month-old infants are less easilydistracted by an external stimulus when theyare engaged in deeper processing of thosetoys than when they are less engaged. At6 months, infants show similar levels ofdistraction in different states of engagement,suggesting that infants’ ability to controltheir attentional focus—and resist distrac-tion during information processing—showsdevelopmental change during this time.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781119170174



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The literature just described suggestsimportant development in the spatial orient-ing of attention during the first postnatal year.More precise understanding of this develop-ment derives from work using tasks that aremore closely related to the tasks developedfor older populations. Specifically, a numberof studies have used tasks that allow moresensitive measures of spatial orienting thatare not conflated with measures of looking.These studies use a task like that illustratedin Figure 1.5. In this task, infants first areinduced to fixate a central location (e.g.,an interesting stimulus is presented in thislocation). Next, as infants fixate this centrallypresented item, a peripheral cue is brieflypresented to the left or right of fixation.Finally, a visual target is presented either inthe validly cued location (i.e., where the cueappeared when the infant was fixating thecentral stimulus) or in an uncued or invalidlocation (i.e., on the side opposite to wherethe cue appeared).

Studies using this procedure have doc-umented that visual attention orienting isfacilitated to the cued location relative tothe uncued location if the interval betweencue and target is short. That is, the sub-ject will detect, perceive, and process the

target faster or better if it is presented in avalidly cued location than if it is presentedin a location that is not cued (Carrasco,2014). Adapting this procedure for usewith infants, Johnson, Posner, and Rothbart(1994) observed adult-like responses insuch a task by 4-month-old infants. Infants,like adults, responded more quickly to atarget that appeared in a cued location.Ross-Sheehy and colleagues (2015) recentlyintroduced an adaptation of this method inwhich infants are exposed to a variety ofcue conditions (e.g., validly cued targets,invalidly cued targets, and neutrally cued tar-gets). Ross-Sheehy et al. observed that olderinfants showed more effective use of the cuesthan did younger infants, experiencing lesscompetition between irrelevant cues.

However, spatial cuing does not alwaysresult in facilitated or faster response to thecued location. Critically, when the delaybetween the cue and the target is long (e.g.,> 200 ms), people are actually worse atresponding to a target that appears in thecued location relative to a target that appearsin the uncued location. This effect, termed“inhibition of return” (IOR), presumablyreflects the system inhibiting returning atten-tion to a previously attended location. That is,

+

+

+ + +

Fixation Cue (100 ms) Delay Interval

Validly Cued Target

Invalidly Cued Target

Figure 1.5 An illustration of spatial cueing attention task. When the infant is fixating the central target(the fixation cross), a cue is briefly presented in the periphery. Following a brief delay, in validly cuedtrials (the top frame), the target is presented in the same location as the cue. In invalidly cued trials (thebottom frame), the target is presented in the opposite location from the cue. Color version of this figureis available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781119170174.



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IOR has been described as an adaptation ofattentional mechanisms such that once alocation is attended and no target occurs,the system inhibits that location in order toencourage orienting to new locations (Klein,2000). As a result of inhibiting the cuedlocation during the delay, any target that ispresented in the cued location is also inhib-ited, resulting in slower eye movements tothat item. There is evidence of IOR in new-borns (Simion, Valenza, Umiltà, & Barba,1995; Valenza, Simion, & Umiltà, 1994)when they are allowed to make overt shiftsof attention to the cue. However, when thecue is too rapid and only a covert attentionshift can be made, IOR appears to emerge at5 to 6 months of age (Richards, 2000) andis stable by 9 months (Markant & Amso,2013, 2015). Richards (2000) paired thistask with presaccadic ERPs to show morecortical involvement of parietal and frontalsites with behavioral developmental changefrom infants 3 to 7 months old. This task,therefore, is a critically important addition tothe available tools to assess visual attention.It offers insight into inhibitory process-ing, an important component of distractorsuppression during target selection.

Another task that also provides insightinto these inhibitory processes is the negativepriming task. In this task, a target and adistractor initially are presented together,presumably eliciting attention to the targetand inhibition to the location of the distractor.(Maintaining attention to the target presum-ably requires inhibiting the distractor.) Then,during a second or probe display, the target ispresented alone, either in a novel (previouslyempty) location or in location previouslyoccupied by the distractor. Because the loca-tion previously occupied by the distractorwas ignored or inhibited, the reasoning isthat infants will have more difficulty ori-enting to a target presented in that location.Indeed, consistent with the data from studies

using IOR tasks, infants’ responses to targetsappearing in previously inhibited locations isslowed compared to their responses to targetsappearing in previously empty locations.Thus, performance on these tasks can be usedto draw conclusions about infants’ abilityto inhibit attention to a particular location.Moreover, the developmental changes in thistask converge with those obtained when usingIOR; infants show developmental change ininhibitory processing across the first post-natal year, with 3-month-olds showing nosign of inhibition but rather facilitation andwith inhibitory processing being robust by9 months (Amso & Johnson, 2005, 2008;Nakagawa & Sukigara, 2007).

Other work has attempted to evaluateinfants’ visual selective attention orientingmore broadly by assessing their performanceon visual search tasks. For example, visualsearch requires shifting attention to a targetand inhibiting attending to distractors. A hall-mark of effortful visual search is that targetidentification takes longer with increasingnumbers of distractors—because the viewermust attend to individual items or regionsof space that contain items, the more itemsthere are, the longer (on average) it willtake to find the target. (See discussion in theprevious section, “Influential Models andCommon Tasks.”)

Variations of visual search tasks have beenused to study visual attention processes ininfants. Very early in infancy, we can askwhat stimulus features automatically captureattention by examining visual pop-out. Forexample, Dannemiller (2005) observed2-month-old and 4.5-month-old infants’orienting to a singleton oscillating targetin a field of static bars. The moving targetshould capture infants’ attention, and theirability to fixate the target and inhibit look-ing at the nonmoving distractors providesinsight into the nature of their visual attentionprocessing. Dannemiller found the pop-out


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effect in 4.5- but not yet in 2-month-oldinfants.

Using eye tracking, Amso and Johnson(2006) observed that 3-month-old infantseffectively selected both a moving targetin a field of nonmoving targets and an ori-ented bar in a field of vertical bars moreoften than would be expected by chance.Performance on the moving target search wassignificantly better than on the more diffi-cult orientation-based search. Frank, Amso,and Johnson (2014) showed developmentalimprovement in both search tasks from 3 to10 months of age.

Adler and Orprecio (2006) provided addi-tional evidence that at least some aspectsof visual search in infancy are similar tothose in adults. They presented 3-month-oldinfants with two types of visual search arrays:one that should elicit a preattentive targetdetection for adults (detecting a + in anarray of Ls, or target-present arrays) andanother that should be elicit more effortfulattention (an array of all Ls, or target-absentarrays). Indeed, Adler and Orprecio observedthat both 3-month-old infants and adultshad similar latencies to find the + in thetarget-present trials regardless of the numberof distractors, but their performance var-ied considerably by the number of itemsin the target-absent trials. Similar resultswere reported by Adler and Gallego (2014).Thus, although we must be cautious aboutconcluding that similar patterns of behaviorin infants and adults necessarily reflect thesame underlying processing (particularly asadults are given instructions in this task andinfants are not), these findings show somesimilarities in how infants and adults searchfor targets in cluttered visual arrays.

Work using computational modelingprovides insight into the developmentalmechanisms behind this development, inparticular the neural development thatmay support developmental changes in

orienting during visual search early ininfancy. Specifically, work using computa-tional modeling has identified increases inthe size of horizontal connections in primaryvisual cortex and the duration of recurrentposterior parietal activity as critical to effec-tive visual attention orienting performancein infant visual search data (Schlesinger,Amso, & Johnson, 2007, 2012).

In a different type of visual search exper-iment, Kwon et al. (2016) presented 4- to8-month-old infants with an array of 6 dif-ferent photographs of familiar items (shoe,flower, vehicle). One item in each array wasa human face. Whereas 4-month-old infantswere drawn to the most physically salientitem in the array (as defined by brightnessand orientation), 6- and 8-month-old infantslooked at the human faces. Studies like theseuncover spontaneous behavior by infantswhen presented with visual search arrays andbegin to reveal how infants’ looking behavior(and visual attention) is controlled by exter-nal stimulus factors (such as movement orphysical salience) versus other, nonphysicalfeatures (such as familiarity or meaning).Consistent with other work examining visualattention in infancy, the results of Kwonet al. showed that by 6 months, infants coulduse top-down content, such as familiarityor meaning inherent in a human face, toendogenously guide visual attention orient-ing in the presence of distraction. Data likethese are consistent with the general con-clusion that processes engaged in voluntarycontrol of attention increase during the firstpostnatal year.

Recall that Colombo (2001) described twoorienting functions of attention, one basedon location and the other based on objectfeatures. As just described, most of the workon visual attention in infancy has focused onthe spatial orienting function of attention.But there is a small emerging literature onobject-based attention in infancy. The term


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“object-based visual attention” refers toattention to one of many features or objectsat a particular location at the expense ofothers. Using cuing methods, adults havebeen shown to have object-based attention.For example, Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994)presented a cue on a part of an object; this cuehelped adults attend to the object, facilitatingtheir detection of a target that subsequentlyis presented on that object compared to anequally distant target presented on a differentobject.

Bulf et al. (2013) used a variation of thistask to examine object-based attention ininfants. (See Figure 1.6.) In this variation,infants first saw two identical bars for a briefperiod of time. Then, a cue appeared on one ofthe two bars. After a delay (200 ms interstim-ulus interval [ISI] in Figure 1.6), infants thensaw a target presented in the cued location orin one of two uncued locations—both equally

distant from the cue. However, one kind ofthe uncued items (the “Invalid same-object”array in the figure) was presented on thecued object, whereas the other kind ofuncued item (the “Invalid different-objects”array in the figure) was presented on theother object. Eight-month-old infants alsoshowed object-based attention cuing ben-efit; they were faster to detect targets inthe same-object displays relative to targetsin the between-objects displays. (See alsoValenza, Franchin, & Bulf, 2014.) In general,researchers agree that object-based attentioneffects depend heavily on the strength ofobject representation and recognition as wellas object characteristics, such as goodness(Chen, 2012). Although object-based atten-tion is not yet well studied in developmentalscience, the study of object perception andrecognition enjoys a long history of devel-opmental research beginning with Piaget.

Invalid same-object Invalid different-objectsValid

Time

ISI = 200 ms

CUE = 100 ms

Bars = 1 s

Attention gender

TARGET

Figure 1.6 Illustrates the procedure used by Bulf & Valenza (2013) to examine object-based visualattention in 8-month-old infants.Source: Bulf & Valenza (2013), published by APA. Reprinted with permission.


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Thus, future research may build on thisfoundational work on infants’ object-basedattention and work on object perception andrecognition to provide deeper insight into thedevelopment of attention more broadly.

Attention in Early Childhood

The transition from infancy to early child-hood comes with continued development ofvisual attention processes. Notably, the rele-vant changes are not solely in visual attentionprocesses. These processes in childhoodoperate in a different body than they had ininfancy. Young children are mobile, willful,and have strong emerging language skills.Thus, visual attention processes become inte-grated into a larger set space of competingexploratory skills. It follows that while bothalerting and orienting show some measurabledevelopmental change into childhood, it isthe executive processes that become a crit-ical component of managing or regulatingthe now-dynamic opportunities facing thegrowing child.

Although not explicitly focused on under-standing visual attention per se, early studiesof toddlers’ and preschool children’s sus-tained attention during television watchingprovide some insight into attentional abil-ities, at least in the context of watching acomplex, dynamic, multimodal stimulus. Thefindings suggest developmental changes inthe alerting network during this period. Forexample, children’s attention to televisionprogramming increased between age 1 and4 years (Anderson & Levin, 1976), and chil-dren’s sustained attention during televisionviewing was related to their comprehensionof the content (Lorch, Anderson, & Levin,1979). Such findings provide a foundationfor understanding how children’s sustainedattention develops during early childhood andsuggests that, as with infants (e.g., Cohen,1991), the duration of periods of sustainedattention is related to children’s processing

of the stimulus content. Moreover, 5-year-oldchildren are less distractible—and presum-ably more engaged—when the content beingviewed is comprehensible than when it is not(Lorch & Castle, 1997). During the preschoolyears, there continue to be developmentalchanges in children’s ability to maintainan alert and engaged attentional state, andthis ability is enhanced by their ability tounderstand the content of the stimulus beingvisually attended.

In addition, the study of children’s gen-eral attention processes while viewingtelevision—and to some extent during toyplay—led to conclusions about the devel-opment of attentional inertia, or the processby which attention becomes more engagedover time (Richards & Anderson, 2004).The notion is that sustained attention buildsand engagement with the stimulus deepensover the period of sustained attention. Thisconclusion is supported by the fact thatchildren become less easily distracted asa period of sustained attention continues(Anderson, Choi, & Lorch, 1987; Oakes,Ross-Sheehy, & Kannass, 2004) and byphysiological changes, including reductionsin heart rate, that occur over prolongedperiods of sustained attention (Richards &Cronise, 2000; Richards & Gibson, 1997).This characteristic of increasing engagementover periods of sustained attention is not spe-cific to the preschool years; there is evidenceof this process in infancy (Oakes et al., 2004)through the preschool period (Richards &Cronise, 2000). Of course, developmentalchanges in attention occur during this timeperiod. Given the same stimulus, periods ofsustained attention increase over age, andcomprehension appears to have an increasinginfluence on children’s sustained attentionduring the preschool period (Richards &Anderson, 2004).

Other work examined developmentalchanges in sustained attention in other


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contexts. For example, in a longitudinalstudy, Ruff et al. (1998) showed increases inchildren’s duration of looking and focusedattention between 2.5 and 4.5 years of ageduring free play and watching a puppet show,suggesting changes in children’s ability tosustain an engaged attentional state. More-over, the context—particularly the numberof toys present—may influence whether sus-tained attention increases or decreased frominfancy through the preschool years (Ruff &Capozzoli, 2003). Such effects underscorethe close connection between attention andother cognitive processes and how attention isdifferentially engaged depending on the cog-nitive load imposed by the task. During thepreschool period, there appear to be changesin the level of engagement during attention,with older children being more resistant todistraction than younger children are duringperiods of sustained attention during toy play(Ruff & Capozzoli, 2003). Taken together,this research has revealed changes duringearly childhood in the duration and the levelof engagement during periods of sustainedattention. Because sustained attention isrelated to information processing—and thecomprehensibility and complexity of thestimulus content—developmental changesmust be evaluated taking into considerationthe nature of the stimuli, task, context, andother factors.

The work during early childhood alsoreveals changes in orienting. For example,Gerhardstein and Rovee-Collier (2002) useda visual search task (their stimuli are illus-trated in Figure 1.2) to examine orienting inchildren between 1 and 3 years of age. Inthis task, children were taught to touch thetarget. Recall that in Figure 1.2a, the target isdifferent from the distractors only by a singlefeature, and therefore the feature task shouldbe easy and not require attention. Recallthat the target in Figure 1.2b is defined bya conjunction of features—it is the instance

that is defined by a specific color/shapecombination—and search for this targetshould require attention and should be effort-ful. Indeed, Gerhardstein and Rovee-Collierfound the number of items in the arraysin the feature task had no effect; the onlysignificant effect was that younger childrenwere slower to find the target. Thus, detectingthe target did not appear to require effortfulattentional orienting. In contrast, children’sperformance in the conjunction task variedwith the number of distractors—children hadmore difficulty identifying the target whenthere were more distractors. In both tasks,younger children were generally less efficientand less accurate than older children, but theeffect of attention seemed to be the sameacross this age range, suggesting that theonly developmental effects observed herewere those that reflect developmental changein young children’s general attentionalabilities, or something related to makinga response. Scerif and colleagues (2004)observed similar results in a touch-screenvisual search task with children in this sameage range. However, because Scerif et al.also included some of the displays withouttargets, they could examine not only searchtimes but also other variables, such as searchpaths and perseverative errors to nontargets.The inclusion of such variables may haveyielded more sensitivity to developmentaldifferences in this age range. Other workusing more traditional visual search tasks(pressing a key when a target is found withinan array) revealed developmental differencesin somewhat older children (6–10 versusadults) in conjunction searches (Trick &Enns, 1998). Future work comparing differ-ent types of visual search tasks may revealthe source of such discrepancies.

Finally, the increased awareness thatdevelopmental changes in attention dur-ing early childhood reflect, at least in part,changes in executive attention or cognitive


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control has led to the development of newtasks to tap those developing systems. Asdescribed earlier, variations of the flankertask have been developed for use with chil-dren as young as 4 (McDermott et al., 2007).This task, which is depicted in Figure 1.3,simplifies the traditional flanker task byreducing the perceptual demands of the stim-uli and increases the child’s ability to applyexisting knowledge to their processing ofthe stimuli. The Track-It task developed byFisher et al. (2013) is also argued to examineexecutive attention.

By manipulating features of the distrac-tors (e.g., whether they are all the same orvary), Fisher et al. (2013) argued that thistask allows assessment of endogenous andexogenous factors on children’s sustainedselective attention.

In summary, during the toddler andpreschool years, there continue to be signif-icant changes in attentional processes, withevidence that children are becoming increas-ingly more efficient in their visual attentionorienting and more capable of sustainedattention.

Attention in Later Childhoodand Adolescence

The transition into later childhood bringsmodest developmental change in visualattention alerting and orienting but morerobust change in executive attention. Indeed,much of the work in later childhood andearly adolescence has focused on cognitivecontrol, which is closely related—and mayoverlap with—executive attention.

Work with older children and adolescencesuggests that there is little change in orientingattention in late childhood. Enns and Brodeur(1989) showed that 5- to 9-year-old childrenare more influenced by an orienting cue thanare adults—both in terms of the benefit ofa valid cue on their attention performanceand the interference from an invalid cue.

(See also Konrad et al., 2005.) However,several studies have shown that by 8 to10 years, children’s orienting is adult-like.Rueda et al. (2004) showed that in the ANTby age 10, children receive the same benefitas adults from an alerting cue. Other workhas shown that visual attention orientingis adult-like by 8 to 10 years (Goldberg,Maurer, & Lewis, 2001; Rueda, Rothbart,McCandliss, Saccomanno, & Posner, 2005;Waszak, Li, & Hommel, 2010). Using a spa-tial cuing task, Markant and Amso (2014) didnot observe developmental change in visualattention orienting, with either facilitation- orIOR-inducing timing, in children 7 to 17years of age, which suggests stable visualattention orienting in this age range. Thus,any changes in these attention networksbeyond early childhood are subtle and muchless dramatic than the development thatoccurs in infancy and early childhood.

In contrast to alerting and orienting, thedevelopment of executive attention processesis more protracted, with changes into ado-lescence Executive attention processes areinvolved when contexts or tasks require inhi-bition of conflicting or interfering sourcesof information in the visual environment.Resolving such conflict requires some over-arching rule to guide visual attention. Forexample, executive attention is engaged whena target is flanked by distractors that presenta conflict (see Figure 1.3)—such as whenthe direction of flanking arrows is differentfrom the direction of a central arrow target.Research using tasks that require attentionin the context of such conflict has revealedthat executive attention is not yet adult-likein childhood (Goldberg et al., 2001) and con-tinues to develop into adolescence (Konradet al., 2005; Waszak et al., 2010).

Additional insight into the development ofexecutive attention comes from work usingthe anti-saccade task (Guitton, Buchtel, &Douglas, 1985). In this task, children are

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