From features to dimensions: cognitive and motor development in pop-out search in children and young adults

Visual and cognitive processes contribute to age-related improvements in visual selective attention

Children (N = 103, 4-9 years, 59 females, 84% White, c. 2019) completed visual processing, visual feature integration (color, luminance, motion), and visual search tasks. Contrast sensitivity and feature search improved with age similarly for luminance and color-defined targets. Incidental feature integration improved more with age for color-motion than luminance-motion. Individual differences in feature search (β  = .11) and incidental feature integration (β  = .06) mediated age-related changes in conjunction visual search, an index of visual selective attention. These findings suggest that visual selective attention is best conceptualized as a series of developmental trajectories, within an individual, that vary by an object's defining features. These data have implications for design of educational and interventional strategies intended to maximize attention for learning and memory.

The Relationship between Executive Functions and Gross Motor Skills in Rural Children Aged 8–10 Years

Considering that cognitive and motor dimensions of human beings grow together, and that primary school age is one of the most important stages of children’s cognitive and motor development, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between executive functions and gross motor skills in rural children aged 8–10 years. This descriptive and correlational research was conducted with 93 Iranian rural primary school children aged 8 to 10 years. A Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) questionnaire and the Test of Gross Motor Development, second edition (TGMD-2) were used to collect data on executive functions and gross motor skills, respectively. The results showed that most of the correlations between criterion and predictor variables were moderate. In the regression results we observed that among the components of executive functions, inhibition, working memory, planning/organizing, and organization had a significant relationship with gross motor skills, but no relationship was found between other components and motor skills. As a result, it can be said that in predicting cognitive development and specifically mentioned executive functions, gross motor skills are an important and effective factor among rural children and, given the importance of cognitive development and executive functions in childhood, it seems that by helping to develop their gross motor skills, executive functions will also be strengthened. Finally, possible future studies are addressed, which could investigate the effect of different aspects of motor skill classifications on executive functions.

The development of foraging organization

In foraging tasks, multiple targets must be found within a single display. The targets can be of one or more types, typically surrounded by numerous distractors. Visual attention has traditionally been studied with single target search tasks, but adding more targets to the search display results in several additional measures of interest, such as how attention is oriented to different features and locations over time. We measured foraging among five age groups: Children in Grades 1, 4, 7, and 10, as well as adults, using both simple feature foraging tasks and more challenging conjunction foraging tasks, with two target types per task. We assessed participants' foraging organization, or systematicity when selecting all the targets within the foraging display, on four measures: Intertarget distance, number of intersections, best-r, and the percentage above optimal path length (PAO). We found that foraging organization increases with age, in both simple feature-based foraging and more complex foraging for targets defined by feature conjunctions, and that feature foraging was more organized than conjunction foraging. Separate analyses for different target types indicated that children's, and to some extent adults', conjunction foraging consisted of two relatively organized foraging paths through the display where one target type is exhaustively selected before the other target type is selected. Lastly, we found that the development of foraging organization is closely related to the development of other foraging measures. Our results suggest that measuring foraging organization is a promising avenue for further research into the development of visual orienting.

Less efficient detection of positive facial expressions in parents at risk of engaging in child physical abuse

Background

Parental physical punishment (e.g., spanking) of children can gradually escalate into child physical abuse (CPA). According to social-information processing (SIP) models of aggressive behaviors, distorted social cognitive mechanisms can increase the risk of maladaptive parenting behaviors by changing how parents detect, recognize, and act on information from their social environments. In this study, we aimed to identify differences between mothers with a low and high risk of CPA regarding how quickly they detect positive facial expressions.

Methods

Based on their use of spanking to discipline children, 52 mothers were assigned to a low- (n = 39) or high-CPA-risk group (n = 13). A single-target facial emotional search (face-in-the-crowd) task was used, which required participants to search through an array of faces to determine whether a target emotional face was present in a crowd of non-target neutral faces. Search efficiency index was computed by subtracting the search time for target-present trials from that for target-absent trials.

Results

The high-CPA-risk group searched significantly less efficiently for the happy, but not sad, faces, than did the low-CPA-risk group; meanwhile, self-reported emotional ratings (i.e., valence and arousal) of the faces did not differ between the groups.

Conclusions

Consistent with the SIP models, our findings suggest that low- and high-CPA-risk mothers differ in how they rapidly detect positive facial expressions, but not in how they explicitly evaluate them. On a CPA-risk continuum, less efficient detection of positive facial expressions in the initial processes of the SIP system may begin to occur in the physical-discipline stage, and decrease the likelihood of positive interpersonal experiences, consequently leading to an increased risk of CPA.

Differential inter-trial effects in the visual search of children, adolescents, and young adults

We examined the age-related variation in one type of inter-trial effect of visual search, the distractor previewing effect (DPE), in affectively neutral and affectively charged contexts. In Experiment 1, children, adolescents, and young adults were faster to identify the shape of a color target when the color of the current distractors had already been previewed than when the target had been previewed in the preceding target-absent trial, indicative of a color-based DPE. The results revealed a greater DPE in children than in adolescents and young adults, but it can be attributed to children's slower RTs than the other two groups. In Experiment 2, children, adolescents, and young adults were instructed to respond to a schematic face that was different from the other two faces. Young adults were faster in searching for a threatening face among friendly ones when they had previewed a target-absent display consisting of friendly faces than that of threatening faces, indicating an emotional DPE. By contrast, children showed a reversed DPE under the same condition, whereas adolescents showed no DPE. Taken together, these results suggested that the three age groups were all able to create an inhibitory attentional bias on the basis of trial history in affectively neutral context, whereas children and adolescents were not able to create such an inhibitory attentional bias in affectively charged contexts in the same way as adults did. These findings implied that the development of attentional inhibition abilities in affectively charged contexts might be delayed compared to those in affectively neutral contexts.

Visual search and the N2pc in children

While there is growing understanding of visual selective attention in children, some aspects such as selection in the presence of distractors are not well understood. Adult studies suggest that when presented with a visual search task, an enhanced negativity is seen beginning around 200 ms (the N2pc) that reflects selection of a target item among distractors. However, it is not known if similar selective attention-related activity is seen in children during visual search. This study was designed to investigate the presence of the N2pc in children. Nineteen children (ages 9–12 years) and 21 adults (ages 18–22 years) completed a visual search task in which they were asked to attend to a fixation surrounded by both a target and a distractor stimulus. Three types of displays were analyzed at parietal electrodes P7 and P8; lateral target/lateral distractor, lateral target/midline distractor, and midline target/lateral distractor. Both adults and children showed a significant increased negativity contralateral compared to ipsilateral to the target (reflected in the N2pc) in both displays with a lateral target while no such effect was seen in displays with a midline target. This suggests that children also utilized additional resources to select a target item when distractors are present. These findings demonstrate that the N2pc can be used as a marker of attentional object selection in children.