Susceptible to distraction: children lack top-down control over spatial attention capture

Unveiling neurodevelopmental changes in multisensory integration while controlling attention

It is well-accepted that multisensory integration (MSI) undergoes protracted maturation from childhood to adulthood. However, existing evidence may have been confounded by potential age-related differences in attention. To unveil neurodevelopmental changes in MSI while matching top-down attention between children and adults, we recorded event-related potentials of healthy children aged 7 to 9 years and young adults in the visual-to-auditory attentional spreading paradigm wherein attention and MSI could be measured concurrently. The absence of children versus adults differences in the visual selection negativity component and behavioral measures of auditory interference first demonstrates that the child group could maintain top-down visual attention and ignore task-irrelevant auditory information to a similar extent as adults. Then, the stimulus-driven attentional spreading quantified by the auditory negative difference (Nd) component was found to be overall absent in the child group, revealing the children's largely immature audiovisual binding process. These findings furnish strong evidence for the protracted maturation of MSI per se from childhood to adulthood, hence providing a new benchmark for characterizing the developmental course of MSI. In addition, we also found that the representation-driven attentional spreading measured by another Nd was present but less robust in children, suggesting their substantially but not fully developed audiovisual representation coactivation process.

Invariant contexts reduce response time variability in visual search in an age-specific way: A comparison of children, teenagers, and adults

Contextual cueing is a phenomenon in which repeatedly encountered arrays of items can enhance the visual search for a target item. This is widely attributed to attentional guidance driven by contextual memory acquired during visual search. Some studies suggest that children may have an immature ability to use contextual cues compared to adults, while others argue that contextual learning capacity is similar across ages. To test the development of context-guided attention, this study compared contextual cueing effects among three age groups: adults (aged 18-33 years, N = 32), teenagers (aged 15-17 years, N = 41), and younger children (aged 8-9 years, N = 43). Moreover, this study introduced a measure of response time variability that tracks fluctuations in response time throughout the experiment, in addition to the conventional analysis of response times. The results showed that all age groups demonstrated significantly faster responses in repeated than non-repeated search contexts. Notably, adults and teenagers exhibited smaller response time variability in repeated contexts than in non-repeated ones, while younger children did not. This implies that children are less efficient at consolidating contextual information into a stable memory representation, which may lead to less stable attentional guidance during visual search.

An ERP investigation of electrocortical responses in pain empathy from childhood through adolescence into adulthood

Only a few studies investigated the neurodevelopment of pain empathy. Here, the temporal dynamics of electrocortical processes in pain empathy during individual neurodevelopment from childhood through adolescence into adulthood, along with the moderation effect of top-down attention, were investigated using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. To investigate the role of top-down attention in empathy development, both A-P task and A-N task were conducted. In the A-P and A-N task, participants are instructed to judge whether the models in pictures were painful or non-painful and count the number of limbs in pictures, respectively. We found that compared to the adolescent and adult groups, the children group responded significantly worse, along with stronger neural responses in both tasks. Compared to the adolescent and adult groups, the differential amplitudes between painful and non-painful conditions of P2, N2 and P3 were significantly larger in the children group. Moreover, this P3 differential amplitude could only be modulated by age in the A-P task. These results suggest that the capacity to empathize has not yet attained complete development in these children. Significantly more attention resources were involuntarily attracted by the nociceptive cues in these children, which could also reflect the immaturity of empathy ability in these children.

Control of Attention in Rhesus Monkeys Measured Using a Flanker Task

At least three processes determine whether information we encounter is attended to or ignored. First, attentional capture occurs when attention is drawn automatically by "bottom up" processes, to distinctive, salient, rewarding, or unexpected stimuli when they enter our sensory field. Second, "top down" attentional control can direct cognitive processing towards goal-relevant targets. Third, selection history, operates through repeated exposure to a stimulus, particularly when associated with reward. Attentional control is measured using tasks that require subjects to selectively attend to goal-relevant stimuli in the face of distractions. In the Eriksen flanker task, human participants report which direction a centrally placed arrow is facing, while ignoring "flanking" arrows that may point in the opposite direction. Attentional control is evident to the extent that performance reflects only the direction of the central arrow. We describe four experiments in which we systematically assessed attentional control in rhesus monkeys using a flanker task. In Experiment 1, monkeys responded according to the identity of a central target, and accuracy and latency varied systematically with manipulations of flanking stimuli, validating our adaptation of the Eriksen flanker task. We then tested for converging evidence of attentional control across three experiments in which flanker performance was modulated by the distance separating targets from flankers (Experiment 2), luminance differences (Experiment 3), and differences in associative value (Experiment 4). The approach described is a new and reliable measure of attentional control in rhesus monkeys that can be applied to a wide range of situations with freely behaving animals.

Be there on time: Spatial-temporal regularities guide young children's attention in dynamic environments

Children's ability to benefit from spatiotemporal regularities to detect goal-relevant targets was tested in a dynamic, extended context. Young adults and children (from a low-deprivation area school in the United Kingdom; N = 80; 5-6 years; 39 female; ethics approval did not permit individual-level race/ethnicity surveying) completed a dynamic visual-search task. Targets and distractors faded in and out of a display over seconds. Half of the targets appeared at predictable times and locations. Search performance in children was poorer overall. Nevertheless, they benefitted equivalently from spatiotemporal regularities, detecting more predictable than unpredictable targets. Children's benefits from predictions correlated positively with their attention. The study brings ecological validity to the study of attentional guidance in children, revealing striking behavioral benefits of dynamic experience-based predictions.

Endogenous control is insufficient for preventing attentional capture in children and adults

Adults are known to have developed the ability to selectively focus their attention in a goal-driven (endogenous) manner but it is less clear at what stage in development (5-6 & 9-11 years) children can endogenously control their attention and whether they behave similarly to adults when managing distractions. In this study we administered a child-adapted cued visual search task to three age-groups: five- to six-year-olds (N = 45), nine- to eleven-year-olds (N = 42) and adults (N = 42). Participants were provided with a cue which either guided their attention towards or away from an upcoming target. On some trials, a singleton distracter was presented which participants needed to ignore. Participants completed three conditions where the cues were: 1) usually helpful (High Predictive), 2) usually unhelpful (Low Predictive) and 3) never helpful (Baseline) in guiding attention towards the target. We found that endogenous cue-utilisation develops with increasing age. Overall, nine- to eleven-year-olds and adults, but not five- to six-year-olds, utilised the endogenous cues in the High Predictive condition. However, all age-groups were unable to ignore the singleton distracter even when using endogenous control. Moreover, we found better cue-maintenance ability was related to poorer distracter-inhibition ability in early-childhood, but these skills were no longer related further on in development. We conclude that overall endogenous control is still developing in early-childhood, but an adult-like form of this skill has been acquired by mid-childhood. Furthermore, endogenous cue-utilisation was shown as insufficient for preventing attentional capture in both children and adults.

The development of oculomotor suppression of salient distractors in children

There is considerable evidence that adults can prevent attentional capture by physically salient stimuli via proactive inhibition. A key question is whether young children can also inhibit salient stimuli to prevent visual distraction. The current study directly compared attentional capture in children (M_age = 5.5 years) and adults (M_age = 19.3 years) by measuring overt eye movements. Participants searched for a target shape among heterogeneous distractor shapes and attempted to ignore a salient color singleton distractor. The destination of first saccades was used to assess attentional capture by the salient distractor, providing a more direct index of attentional allocation than prior developmental studies. Adults were able to suppress saccades to the singleton distractor, replicating previous studies. Children, however, demonstrated no such oculomotor suppression; first saccades were equally likely to be directed to the singleton distractor and nonsingleton distractors. Subsequent analyses indicated that children were able to suppress the distractor, but this occurred approximately 550 ms after stimulus presentation. The current results suggest that children possess some level of top-down control over visual attention, but this top-down control is delayed compared with adults. Development of this ability may be related to executive functions, which include goal-directed behavior such as organized search and impulse control as well as preparatory and inhibitory cognitive functions.

Attentional capture in goal-directed action during childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood

Attentional capture occurs when salient but task-irrelevant information disrupts our ability to respond to task-relevant information. Although attentional capture costs have been found to decrease between childhood and adulthood, it is currently unclear the extent to which such age-related changes reflect an improved ability to recover from attentional capture or to avoid attentional capture. In addition, recent research using hand-tracking techniques with adults indicates that attentional capture by a distractor can generate response activations corresponding to the distractor's location, consistent with action-centered models of attention. However, it is unknown whether attentional capture can also result in the capture of action in children and adolescents. Therefore, we presented 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 13- and 14-year-olds, and adults (N = 96) with a singleton search task in which participants responded by reaching to touch targets on a digital display. Consistent with action-centered models of attention, distractor effects were evident in each age group's movement trajectories. In contrast to movement trajectories, movement times revealed significant age-related reductions in the costs of attentional capture, suggesting that age-related improvements in attentional control may be driven in part by an enhanced ability to recover from-as opposed to avoid-attentional capture. Children's performance was also significantly affected by response repetition effects, indicating that children may be more susceptible to interference from a wider range of task-irrelevant factors than adults. In addition to presenting novel insights into the development of attention and action, these results highlight the benefits of incorporating hand-tracking techniques into developmental research.

The effects of perceptual cues on visual statistical learning: Evidence from children and adults

In visual statistical learning, one can extract the statistical regularities of target locations in an incidental manner. The current study examined the impact of salient perceptual cues on one type of visual statistical learning: probability cueing effects. In a visual search task, the target appeared more often in one quadrant (i.e., rich) than the other quadrants (i.e., sparse). Then, the screen was rotated by 90° and the targets appeared in the four quadrants with equal probabilities. In Experiment 1 without the addition of salient perceptual cues, adults showed significant probability cueing effects, but did not show a persistent attentional bias in the testing phase. In Experiments 2, 3, and 4, salient perceptual cues were added to the rich or the sparse quadrants. Adults showed significant probability cueing effects but no persistent attentional bias. In Experiment 5, younger children, older children, and adults showed significant probability cueing effects. All three groups also showed an attentional gradient phenomenon: reaction times were slower when the targets were in the sparse quadrant diagonal to, rather than adjacent to, the rich quadrant. Furthermore, both children groups showed a persistent egocentric attentional bias in the testing phase. These findings indicated that salient perceptual cues enhanced but did not reduce probability cueing effects, children and adults shared similar basic attentional mechanisms in probability cueing effects, and children and adults showed differences in the persistence of attentional bias.

The development of attentional control mechanisms in multisensory environments

Outside the laboratory, people need to pay attention to relevant objects that are typically multisensory, but it remains poorly understood how the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms develop. We investigated when adult-like mechanisms controlling one's attentional selection of visual and multisensory objects emerge across childhood. Five-, 7-, and 9-year-olds were compared with adults in their performance on a computer game-like multisensory spatial cueing task, while 129-channel EEG was simultaneously recorded. Markers of attentional control were behavioural spatial cueing effects and the N2pc ERP component (analysed traditionally and using a multivariate electrical neuroimaging framework). In behaviour, adult-like visual attentional control was present from age 7 onwards, whereas multisensory control was absent in all children groups. In EEG, multivariate analyses of the activity over the N2pc time-window revealed stable brain activity patterns in children. Adult-like visual-attentional control EEG patterns were present age 7 onwards, while multisensory control activity patterns were found in 9-year-olds (albeit behavioural measures showed no effects). By combining rigorous yet naturalistic paradigms with multivariate signal analyses, we demonstrated that visual attentional control seems to reach an adult-like state at ∼7 years, before adult-like multisensory control, emerging at ∼9 years. These results enrich our understanding of how attention in naturalistic settings develops.

Visual statistical learning in children and adults: evidence from probability cueing

In visual statistical learning (VSL), one can extract and exhibit memory for the statistical regularities of target locations in an incidental manner. The current study examined the development of VSL using the probability cueing paradigm with salient perceptual cues. We also investigated the elicited attention gradient phenomenon in VSL. In a visual search task, the target first appeared more often in one quadrant (i.e., rich) than the other quadrants (i.e., sparse). Then, the participants rotated the screen by 90° and the targets appeared in the four quadrants with equal probabilities. Each quadrant had a unique background color and was, hence, associated with salient perceptual cues. 1st-4th graders and adults participated. All participants showed probability cueing effects to a similar extent. We observed an attention gradient phenomenon, as all participants responded slower to the sparse quadrant that was distant from, rather than the ones that were adjacent to the rich quadrant. In the testing phase, all age groups showed persistent attentional biases based on both egocentric and allocentric perspectives. These findings showed that probability cueing effects may develop early, that perceptual cues can bias attention guidance during VSL for both children and adults, and that VSL can elicit a spaced-based attention gradient phenomenon for children and adults.

The link between reading ability and visual spatial attention across development

Interacting with a cluttered and dynamic environment requires making decisions about visual information at relevant locations while ignoring irrelevant locations. Typical adults can do this with covert spatial attention: prioritizing particular visual field locations even without moving the eyes. Deficits of covert spatial attention have been implicated in developmental dyslexia, a specific reading disability. Previous studies of children with dyslexia, however, have been complicated by group differences in overall task ability that are difficult to distinguish from selective spatial attention. Here, we used a single-fixation visual search task to estimate orientation discrimination thresholds with and without an informative spatial cue in a large sample (N = 123) of people ranging in age from 5 to 70 years and with a wide range of reading abilities. We assessed the efficiency of attentional selection via the cueing effect: the difference in log thresholds with and without the spatial cue. Across our whole sample, both absolute thresholds and the cueing effect gradually improved throughout childhood and adolescence. Compared to typical readers, individuals with dyslexia had higher thresholds (worse orientation discrimination) as well as smaller cueing effects (weaker attentional selection). Those differences in dyslexia were especially pronounced prior to age 20, when basic visual function is still maturing. Thus, in line with previous theories, literacy skills are associated with the development of selective spatial attention.

When visual stimulation of the surrounding environment affects children's cognitive performance

Visual distraction is widely studied in children, particularly in visuospatial cognitive tasks. In these studies, targets and distractors are usually shown in the same display (e.g., the computer screen). However, children are constantly exposed to visually enriched environments (e.g., elementary school classrooms), and little is known about their influence on children's cognition. Although the importance of the surrounding environment is well recognized in the literature, few experimental studies have explored this question. We propose an alternative paradigm to study visual distraction in children that brings together the rigor of experimental psychology and more ecological validity on the exposure to potential environmental distractors. Our study was designed to investigate whether a high-load versus low-load visual surrounding environment influences children's cognitive performance as evaluated by four different cognitive tasks. A sample of 64 children (aged 8-12 years) completed two sessions in two environmental conditions: a high-load visual surrounding environment and a low-load environment. In each session, they performed visuospatial attention and memory tasks. Overall, the results suggested that the high-load visual environment affected children's cognitive performance given that children performed better in the low-load visual environment (e.g., higher percentage of hits, higher Corsi span). Understanding the impact that a visually rich surrounding environment has on children's cognitive processes that support more complex ones is important to support recommendations on how the environment should be organized to foster better daily activities.

Distinguishing among potential mechanisms of singleton suppression

Previous research has revealed that people can suppress salient stimuli that might otherwise capture visual attention. The present study tests between 3 possible mechanisms of visual suppression. According to first-order feature suppression models, items are suppressed on the basis of simple feature values. According to second-order feature suppression models, items are suppressed on the basis of local discontinuities within a given feature dimension. According to global-salience suppression models, items are suppressed on the basis of their dimension-independent salience levels. The current study distinguished among these models by varying the predictability of the singleton color value. If items are suppressed by virtue of salience alone, then it should not matter whether the singleton color is predictable. However, evidence from probe processing and eye movements indicated that suppression is possible only when the color values are predictable. Moreover, the ability to suppress salient items developed gradually as participants gained experience with the feature that defined the salient distractor. These results are consistent with first-order feature suppression models, and are inconsistent with the other models of suppression. In other words, people primarily suppress salient distractors on the basis of their simple features and not on the basis of salience per se. (PsycINFO Database Record

Suppression of overt attentional capture by salient-but-irrelevant color singletons

For more than 2 decades, researchers have debated the nature of cognitive control in the guidance of visual attention. Stimulus-driven theories claim that salient stimuli automatically capture attention, whereas goal-driven theories propose that an individual's attentional control settings determine whether salient stimuli capture attention. In the current study, we tested a hybrid account called the signal suppression hypothesis, which claims that all stimuli automatically generate a salience signal but that this signal can be actively suppressed by top-down attentional mechanisms. Previous behavioral and electrophysiological research has shown that participants can suppress covert shifts of attention to salient-but-irrelevant color singletons. In this study, we used eye-tracking methods to determine whether participants can also suppress overt shifts of attention to irrelevant singletons. We found that under conditions that promote active suppression of the irrelevant singletons, overt attention was less likely to be directed toward the salient distractors than toward nonsalient distractors. This result provides direct evidence that people can suppress salient-but-irrelevant singletons below baseline levels.

Dissociating distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval processes in children: No evidence for developmental deficits

It is often assumed that children show reduced or absent inhibition of distracting material due to pending cognitive maturation, although empirical findings do not provide strong support for the idea of an "inhibitory deficit" in children. Most of this evidence, however, is based on findings from the negative priming paradigm, which confounds distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval processes. To resolve this confound, we adopted a sequential distractor repetition paradigm of Giesen, Frings, and Rothermund (2012), which provides independent estimates of distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval processes. Children (aged 7-9years) and young adults (aged 18-29years) identified centrally presented target fruit stimuli among two flanking distractor fruits that were always response incompatible. Children showed both reliable distractor inhibition effects as well as robust episodic retrieval effects of distractor-response bindings. Age group comparisons suggest that processes of distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval are already present and functionally intact in children and are comparable to those of young adults. The current findings highlight that the sequential distractor repetition paradigm of Giesen et al. (2012) is a versatile tool to investigate distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval separately and in an unbiased way and is also of merit for the examination of age differences with regard to these processes.

Encouraging top-down attention in visual search:A developmental perspective

Four experiments are reported in which 60 younger children (7-8 years old), 60 older children (10-11 years old), and 60 young adults (18-25 years old) performed a conjunctive visual search task (15 per group in each experiment). The number of distractors of each feature type was unbalanced across displays to evaluate participants' ability to restrict search to the smaller subset of features. The use of top-down attention processes to restrict search was encouraged by providing external aids for identifying and maintaining attention on the smaller set. In Experiment 1, no external assistance was provided. In Experiment 2, precues and instructions were provided to focus attention on that subset. In Experiment 3, trials in which the smaller subset was represented by the same feature were presented in alternating blocks to eliminate the need to switch attention between features from trial to trial. In Experiment 4, consecutive blocks of the same subset features were presented in the first or second half of the experiment, providing additional consistency. All groups benefited from external support of top-down attention, although the pattern of improvement varied across experiments. The younger children benefited most from precues and instruction, using the subset search strategy when instructed. Furthermore, younger children benefited from blocking trials only when blocks of the same features did not alternate. Older participants benefited from the blocking of trials in both Experiments 3 and 4, but not from precues and instructions. Hence, our results revealed both malleability and limits of children's top-down control of attention.

Disruptive Effects of Colorful vs. Non-colorful Play Area on Structured Play-A Pilot Study with Preschoolers

To contribute to young children's development, sensory enrichment is often provided via colorful play areas. However, little is known about the effects of colorful environments on children while they engage in age-appropriate tasks and games. Studies in adults suggest that aspects of color can distract attention and impair performance, and children are known to have less developed attentional and executive abilities than adults. Preliminary studies conducted in children aged 5-8 suggest that the colorfulness of both distal (e.g., wall decorations) and proximal (e.g., the surface of the desktop) environments can have a disruptive effect on children's performance. The present research seeks to extend the previous studies to an even younger age group and focus on proximal colorfulness. With a sample of 15 pre-schoolers (3-4 years old) we examined whether a colorful play surface compared to a non-colorful (white) play surface would affect engagement in developmentally appropriate structured play. Our pilot findings suggest that a colorful play surface interfered with preschoolers' structured play, inducing more behaviors indicating disruption in task execution compared with a non-colorful play surface. The implications of the current study for practice and further research are discussed.

Attentional capture in driving displays

Drivers face frequent distraction on the roadways, but little is known about situations placing them at risk of misallocating visual attention. To investigate this issue, we asked participants to search for a red target embedded within simulated driving scenes (photographs taken from inside a car) in three experiments. Distraction was induced by presenting, via a GPS unit, red or green distractors positioned in an irrelevant location at which the target never appeared. If the salient distractor captures attention, visual search should be slower on distractor-present trials than distractor-absent trials. In Experiment 1, salient distractors yielded no such capture effect. In Experiment 2, we decreased the frequency of the salient distractor from 50% of trials to only 10% or 20% of trials. Capture effects were almost five times larger for the 10% occurrence group than for the 20% occurrence group. In Experiment 3, the amount of available central resources was manipulated by asking participants to either simultaneously monitor or ignore a stream of spoken digits. Capture effects were much larger for the dual-task group than for the single-task group. In summary, these findings identify risk factors for attentional capture in real-world driving scenes: distractor rarity and diversion of attention.

Attentional guidance by relative features: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Our ability to select task-relevant information from cluttered visual environments is widely believed to be due to our ability to tune attention to the particular elementary feature values of a sought-after target (e.g., red, orange, yellow). By contrast, recent findings showed that attention is often tuned to feature relationships, that is, features that the target has relative to irrelevant features in the context (e.g., redder, yellower). However, the evidence for such a relational account is so far exclusively based on behavioral measures that do not allow a safe inference about early perceptual processes. The present study provides a critical test of the relational account, by measuring an electrophysiological marker in the EEG of participants (N2pc) in response to briefly presented distractors (cues) that could either match the physical features of the target or its relative features. In a first experiment, the target color and nontarget color were kept constant across trials. In line with a relational account, we found that only cues with the same relative color as the target were attended, regardless of whether the cues had the same physical color as the target. In a second experiment, we demonstrate that attention is biased to the exact target feature value when the target is embedded in a randomly varying context. Taken together, these results provide the first electrophysiological evidence that attention can modulate early perceptual processes differently; in a context-dependent manner versus a context-independent manner, resulting in marked differences in the range of colors that can attract attention.

Processos Cognitivos Visuoespaciais e Ambiente Visual Circundante: Implicações Educacionais

RESUMO Nesta revisão de literatura, abordamos a importância da atenção seletiva, da inibição e da memória de trabalho na aprendizagem das crianças. Começamos por apresentar as suas definições e principais mecanismos funcionais. Apresentamos igualmente conclusões de vários estudos que abordam a importância desses processos, sobretudo em tarefas visuoespaciais. Finalmente, abordamos o papel que o ambiente visual circundante desempenha na aprendizagem, chamando a atenção para uma lacuna que se verifica em grande parte dos estudos: a sua pouca validade ecológica. É também defendido que o ambiente visual externo deve ser considerado nos modelos explicativos dos processos cognitivos básicos. Conclui-se o trabalho alertando para a necessidade de se estudar de forma mais sistemática a relação entre estes dois elementos (cognição e ambiente).

Direct Evidence for Active Suppression of Salient-but-Irrelevant Sensory Inputs

Researchers have long debated whether attentional capture is purely stimulus driven or purely goal driven. In the current study, we tested a hybrid account, called the signal-suppression hypothesis, which posits that stimuli automatically produce a bottom-up salience signal, but that this signal can be suppressed via top-down control processes. To test this account, we used a new capture-probe paradigm in which participants searched for a target shape while ignoring an irrelevant color singleton. On occasional probe trials, letters were briefly presented inside the search shapes, and participants attempted to report these letters. Under conditions that promoted capture by the irrelevant singleton, accuracy was greater for the letter inside the singleton distractor than for letters inside nonsingleton distractors. However, when the conditions were changed to avoid capture by the singleton, accuracy for the letter inside the irrelevant singleton was reduced below the level observed for letters inside nonsingleton distractors, an indication of active suppression of processing at the singleton location.