Differential development of visual attention skills in school-age children

Abstract

Children aged 7-17 years and adults aged 18-22 years were tested on three aspects of visual attention: the ability to distribute visual attention across the field to search for a target, the time required for attention to recover from being directed towards a target, and the number of objects to which attention can be simultaneously allocated. The data suggested different developmental trajectories for these components of visual attention within the same set of participants. This suggests that, to some extent, spatial, temporal and object-based attentional processes are subserved by different neural resources which develop at different rate. In addition, participants who played action games showed enhanced performance on all aspects of attention tested as compared to non-gamers. These findings reveal a potential facilitation of development of attentional skills in children who are avid players of action video games. As these games are predominantly drawing a male audience, young girls are at risk of under-performing on such tests, calling for a careful control of video game usage when assessing gender differences in attentional tasks.

Figure 1

A. The first training task required subjects to discriminate a briefly presented face in the center of the display – the cutaways show detail of the ‘short hair’ and ‘long hair’ faces. B. In the second training task, subjects made the central discrimination and then indicated the location of a peripheral target (a five-pointed star in a circle). C. in the main UFOV task, subjects made the central discrimination and localized the peripheral target, but they did so in the presence of distractor items (23 white squares).

Figure 2

Participants were asked to locate a peripheral stimulus among distractors. Display duration was shortened until participants performed at threshold (~79.3% accuracy). VGPs (❍) required the display to be presented for less time than NVGPs (❏) in order to achieve the same level of accuracy. Error bars indicate the standard error of the mean.

Figure 3

Subjects were presented with a rapid, serial visual presentation of colored shapes in the center of the display. A. In a baseline task, only one target (an isosceles triangle) had to be identified. B. In the main attentional blink task, they were instructed to detect two target shapes (isosceles triangles – T1 and T2) and indicate the direction in which they pointed. The blue isosceles triangle could point either up or down, and the red isosceles triangle either left or right. The assignment of the blue and red triangle to T1 or T2 was done randomly for each subject, but kept constant across trials.

Figure 4

For the attentional blink task, the attentional return lag was defined as the lag of time elapsed between T1 and T2 at which performance on T2 (given T1 was correctly discriminated) had recovered to 80% of maximum. VGPs (❍)recovered more quickly than NVGPs (❏); this effect was especially marked in young gamers. Error bars indicate the standard error of the mean.

Figure 5

The multiple object tracking threshold measures how many objects can be apprehended at the same time with 79.3% accuracy. Video game players (❍) had larger tracking thresholds than non-video game players(❏), suggesting video game players can allocate attention to more objects at the same time.

Figure 6

Scatterplots of NVGP performance on the UFOV, AB and MOT tasks as a function of age and gender.

Figure 6

Scatterplots of NVGP performance on the UFOV, AB and MOT tasks as a function of age and gender.