Children's Attention to Stimulus Components With Variation in Relative Salience of Components and Degree of Stimulus Integration1

Abstract

A total of 400 children at ages 5, 9 and 12 years were given a component selection task with stimuli varying in both color and shape. Component salience was manipulated (across subjects) in two steps, in an effort to redirect attention from the normally dominant shape component toward color: the standard shapes and colors from earlier studies were compared with standard shapes in fluorescent colors, and the latter materials in turn were compared with nonsense shapes in fluorescent colors. For each salience condition, the color was either contained within the shape (integrated stimuli) or served as a background for the shape (nonintegrated stimuli). While fluorescence of color had little effect, the replacement of standard geometric forms with nonsense figures caused a shift in attention toward color and away from shape. This attentional shift became more marked between ages 5 and 9 years; with age, children apparently withdraw attention from the normally dominant feature to an increasing degree, while they adopt another component as the primary cue for stimulus identification. Integration of components did not influence the pattern of salience effects but generally increased attention to color. Comparison of the component selection task with a dimension-preference matching test showed that only the former measure was sensitive to the effects of component salience on attention. CHILDREN'S ATTENTION TO STIMULUS COMPONENTS WITH VARIATION IN RELATIVE SALIENCE OF COMPONENTS AND DEGREE OF STIMULUS INTEGRATION 1Gordon A. Hale and Roberta Z. Green Educational Testing ServiceSelective attention is an integral part of the chain of events by which learning occurs (Broadbent, 1971;Neisser, 1967;Trabasso & Bower, 1968;Zeaman & House, 1963). If the stimuli in a learning task are complex, an individual will concentrate his thought upon selected information and ignore the remainder. The selected information in a stimulus becomes the "functional cue" for learning, in that it serves as the basis for identifying the stimulus and for discriminating it from other stimuli. In the study of children's learning, it is therefore essential to understand how selective attention operates over the course of development, in order to know what stimulus information is actually utilized by children at any given age (Gibson, 1969;Hagen & Hale, 1973; Haccoby, 1969).A series of recent studies has examined developmental changes in the functional cue for children, in the case of two-component visual stimuli (Hale & Lipps, 1974;Hale & Morgan, 1973; Hale & Taweel, 1974a. 1974bHale, Taweel, Green & Flaugher, 1974).2 In these studies, one stimulus component has tended to be dominant with any given set of materials, in the sense that subjects direct the majority of their attention to that feature. Of particular interest is how this dominance relationship varies as a function of the task conditions, and how the pattern of results is influenced by the subjects' age. One recent result is quite suggestive; when children were instructed to concentrate ...