Attention control abilities are relevant for learning success. Little is known about the development of audio-visual attention in early childhood. Four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years and adults performed an audio-visual distraction paradigm (N = 106). Multilevel analyses revealed increased reaction times in a visual categorization task when task-irrelevant novel sounds were presented, demonstrating involuntary distraction of attention. This distraction effect decreased with age and significantly differed between age groups. In addition, the two youngest age groups responded with a delay in trials following a distractor trial, indicating delayed reallocation of attention to the task at hand. Results indicate a significant maturation of audio-visual attention control within a few years during early childhood that continues throughout middle childhood.
New task-irrelevant sounds can distract attention. This study specifies the impact of stimulus novelty and of learning on attention control in three groups of children aged 6–7, 8, and 9–10 years and an adult control group. Participants (N = 179) were instructed to ignore a sound sequence including standard sounds and novel or repeated distractor sounds, while performing a visual categorization task. Distractor sounds impaired performance in children more than in adult controls, demonstrating the long-term development of attention control. Children, but not adults, were more distracted by novel than by repeated sounds, indicating increased sensitivity to novel information. Children, in particular younger children, were highly distracted during the first presentations of novel sounds compared to adults, while no age differences were observed for the last presentations. Results highlight the age-related impact of auditory novel information on attention and characterize the rapid development of attention control mechanisms as a function of age and exposure to irrelevant novel sounds.
1The ability to predict upcoming structured events based on long-term knowledge and 2 contextual priors is a fundamental principle of human cognition. Tonal music triggers 3 predictive processes based on structural properties of harmony, i.e., regularities defining the 4 arrangement of chords into well-formed musical sequences. While the neural architecture of 5 structure-based predictions during music perception is well described, little is known about 6 the neural networks for analogous predictions in musical actions and how they relate to 7 auditory perception. To fill this gap, expert pianists were presented with harmonically 8 congruent or incongruent chord progressions, either as musical actions (photos of a hand 9 playing chords) that they were required to watch and imitate without sound, or in an auditory 10 format that they listened to without playing. By combining task-based functional magnetic 11 resonance imaging (fMRI) with functional connectivity at rest, we identified distinct sub-12 regions in right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) interconnected with parietal and temporal areas 13 for processing action and audio sequences, respectively. We argue that the differential 14 contribution of parietal and temporal areas is tied to motoric and auditory long-term 15 representations of harmonic regularities that dynamically interact with computations in rIFG.
16Parsing of the structural dependencies in rIFG is co-determined by both stimulus-or task-
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