Your thoughts on attention and cues

Background

Attention is the ability to maintain focus on relevant stimuli without becoming distracted. The orienting systems comprises exogenous and endogenous attention. Exogenous attention is a reflexive mechanism that is automatically activated by unexpected stimuli in the environment. Whereas endogenous orienting of attention is voluntary and requires cognitive effort to withdraw from one stimulus and attend to another. Adults have developed an efficient mechanism to redirect attention, with evidence to suggest that exogenous attention develops in infancy. However, it remains unclear at what stage of development endogenous spatial orienting reaches maturation.

Research Questions / Hypotheses

The present study consisted of two experiments. The first aimed to investigate at what stage endogenous orienting of attention develops in children using the Staged Attentional Network Task, which uses centrally located endogenous cues to direct attention in space. Additionally, participants were interviewed to understand how children learn and use rule-based cues to efficiently shift attention. The second experiment modified the Staged ANT to include implicit learning of the cues, to investigate if cues could be learned subconsciously to improve endogenous orienting performance.

Participants

In the first experiment twenty adults (first year psychology students recruited from the REP program), and twenty children (aged between 6-12 years) participated. One child with a hearing impairment was excluded based on outlier data. There were no adult exclusions. In the second experiment twenty adults (first year psychology students recruited from the REP program), and twenty children (aged between 6-12 years) participated. One child with a dyslexia diagnosis was excluded as data showed they were not able to understand the task. There were no adult exclusions.

Methods

Experiment 1 was completed in one 45 min sitting. Constant and demographic information were collected via Qualtrics. Participants then completed the Staged ANT attention experiment followed by the semi-structured interview. The Staged ANT was a computer-based task. Two rectangular boxes were presented on the blank screen with a fixation cross in between. An arrow then flashed up in one of the two rectangles. Participants had to indicate on a game pad if the arrow was pointing up or down as quickly as possible. The endogenous cues were coloured fixation crosses that represented a rule that the participants learnt. For example, a yellow cross meant the arrow would appear on the left-hand side. Experiment 2 was the same as the first experiment except the instructions were removed from the Staged ANT and 100% valid trials were included to implicitly "teach" participants the meaning of the endogenous cues. Instead of an interview participants answered question to gauge their learning of the cues. Response time data and percentage of correct responses were recorded. Qualitative data was analyzed using NVivo and organized into themes.

Results

Results from the first experiment suggested that children were just as efficient at orienting their attention using endogenous cues as adults. Results of the second experiment suggested that children and adults were not able to learn the meaning of the endogenous cues implicitly to efficiently orient their attention in space.

Implications

This project aims to contribute to the understanding of endogenous orienting development in children. Results suggested that endogenous orienting of attention becomes adult-like between the ages of 6-12 years of age. This study also provides valuable qualitative insight into the experience of participants while engaging in a spatial orienting task. The findings of this research have been communicated in the form of a thesis and presented in a student conference.