Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Social Psychology

,

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119170082
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Experimental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

IV. Developmental & Social Psychology: Simona Ghetti (Volume Editor)

(Topics covered include development of visual attention; self-evaluation; moral development; emotion-cognition interactions; person perception; memory; implicit social cognition; motivation group processes; development of scientific thinking; language acquisition; development of mathematical reasoning; emotion regulation; emotional development; development of theory of mind; category and conceptual development; attitudes; executive function.)

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER 1
Development of Visual Attention

LISA OAKES AND DIMA AMSO

INTRODUCTION

Consider a child searching a crowded room for her parent. Perhaps there are several people in the room as well as furniture, toys, and other objects. In addition, there may be decorations on the wall, light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, windows, curtains, and so on. Visual attention is the set of processes that allows the child to filter the overly cluttered visual world, selecting some available information to process—in this case the people—and inhibiting other available information—in this case the furniture, light fixtures, and curtains. These attentional processes are governed by a complex set of interacting neural systems that develop over infancy and childhood.

In what follows, we provide formal definitions of those visual attention processes that are most relevant to infants and children. Next, we describe influential models and tasks of visual attention. Then we discuss what is known about the development of attentional processes during infancy, early childhood, and later childhood and beyond. We describe historical work examining looking behavior as a measure of visual attention, which provides a foundation for our understanding of the development of visual attention across childhood. We also discuss more contemporary work using more standard visual attention tasks, often adapted from work with adults. Throughout, we discuss the paradigms that have been used to assess visual attention in infancy and childhood, including a discussion of what specific computations or processes of visual attention each assesses. Finally, we examine how visual attention processes (and their development) interact with other cognitive and perceptual systems such as memory and learning, how novel neuroimaging tools add insight into neural systems development underlying visual attention, and future directions in visual attention research.

BACKGROUND ISSUES

Defining Visual Attention

Defining attention is not trivial. In part, this is because many meanings of the term “attention” are intuitive—we know that children who are paying attention are quiet, looking at the thing they are paying attention to, and not doing something else. We know that children who have problems with attention have difficulty staying on task and are easily distracted by thoughts, tasks, or stimuli in their environment. We command others to “pay attention,” and we talk informally about the inability to maintain attention (e.g., “spacing out”).

However, the scientific study of the development of attention requires a more formal and precise definition. As the example just described illustrates, attention is necessary in contexts of information overload. Without attention, it would be impossible to bind features of visual objects (such as color and shape) (Treisman, 1998), overcome limited visual working memory capacity (Awh, Vogel, & Oh, 2006), or process a signal effectively in a noisy context (Carrasco, 2014). Luck and Vecera (2002) offer a process‐oriented definition of attention that states that (1) attention is the selection of information among alternatives, and (2) this selection improves the effectiveness of mental processes. Visual attention, therefore, allows us to select information from the visual environment for further processing while simultaneously ignoring or inhibiting competing information that is not selected. The point is that when defining the term “attention,” we can focus on the function of attention. By engaging in selection and inhibition, visual attention turns up the gain on some items and locations for subsequent goal‐relevant action, perception, and memory (Carrasco, 2011, 2014; Markant, Worden, & Amso, 2015; Zhang et al., 2011).

Note, however, that this definition of attention does not restrict attention to a single modality or level of processing. Our task here, however, is to describe the development of visual attention. It is important to recognize that even behavior that we would clearly consider visual attention—for example, directing fixation or processing resources to an aspect of the visual environment—is a function of many processes, only some of which are solely visual. General level of arousal, for example, may influence the depth of one's attentional engagement. Voluntary control over head and eye movements will contribute to overt direction of visual attention. And high‐level processes, such as establishing goals, prioritizing events and stimuli in terms of their relevance, and applying existing knowledge to a current situation, will influence visual attention. As such, visual attention does not operate in isolation. Recognizing these connections and evaluating the literature with an understanding of the possible roles of multiple factors and processes on visual attention can enable us to attain deep understanding of visual attention and its development.

It is also important to recognize that visual attention is a set of computations or processes rather than a skill or content domain. A formal and precise definition of attention requires consideration of the structures and mechanisms that support these processes and functions. An important framework for understanding visual attention is Posner and Petersen's (Petersen & Posner, 2012; Posner & Petersen, 1990) classic model. This model describes three aspects of attention—alerting, orienting, and executive attention—that are supported by different neural networks (Fan, McCandliss, Fossella, Flombaum, & Posner, 2005; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002; Posner & Petersen, 1990). Each of these aspects of attention applies to specific aspects of visual attention. The alerting response, supported by thalamic involvement, is a phasic attentional readiness and is a prepared response to a warning (a tone prepares runners for the official start of a race) stimulus. A related sustained attention mechanism involves a more continuous focus on a particular task or stimulus. The orienting mechanism involves shifting attention to an item or a location either with an overt eye movement or covertly, without a physical eye movement. Visual attention orienting recruits a parietal network. The executive attention mechanism is involved in switching, inhibiting, and general top‐down control of visual attention, and it involves frontoparietal cortices and the anterior cingulate cortex. Clearly, each of these attention functions also is influenced by and relies on other processes.

For example, motor development and oculomotor development are extremely relevant to the development of visual attention processes. Overt attention, which in some ways is the most straightforward and obvious example of visual attention, involves turning one's head and eyes to bring a stimulus, object, or feature of the environment into focus. Overt attention thus relies on the physical abilities involved in holding one's head upright, making effortful and voluntary head turns, and voluntarily controlling eye movements. Motor control over the head and eyes undergoes significant developmental change in infancy (Bertenthal & Von Hofsten, 1998; Canfield & Kirkham, 2001; von Hofsten, 2004), which opens up novel exploratory and attentional strategies for young infants (Gibson, 1988).

Moreover, there are many similarities between visual attention and related general attention processes as well as attention that operates over other sensory modalities, such as auditory attention. For example, regardless of the modality, attention involves selection of relevant stimuli and inhibition of distractors. In addition, attention as used in one modality may in fact influence attention in other modalities. Amso et al. (2014) argued that the development of visual attention may depend on the development of visual processing (see also Amso & Scerif, 2015). Smith and Trainor (2011) made a similar argument with respect to auditory selective attention: specifically that auditory selective attention in infants depends on infants' ability to perceptually process target and nontarget sounds. Direct data comparing the developmental trajectories of these processes is sparse. One recent study (Günther et al., 2014) compared visual and auditory selective attention processes in a group of participants 7 to 77 years on a focused‐attention task. The authors found that participants were better in the visual than in the auditory conditions, but the modality effect diminished with age. These data suggest different developmental trajectories for visual and auditory attention. We highlight these similarities and differences to point out that although understanding visual attention is relevant to the study of auditory attention, the two processes have distinct and nontransferable developmental trajectories.

Influential Models and Common Tasks

Most views of attention derive from the influential model of Posner and Petersen (Petersen & Posner, 2012; Posner & Petersen, 1990). As described in the previous section, this model describes alerting, orienting, and executive attention, all subserved by different neural structures and all of which have different functions related to the selection and filtering of relevant information and the inhibition of irrelevant or distracting information. These attentional processes have been widely studied and have been examined over a wide age range. Thus, many other models of attention have focused on similar processes.

As an example, consider the four functions of attenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
• SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement