Cognitive development attenuates audiovisual distraction and promotes the selection of task-relevant perceptual saliency during visual search on complex scenes

Abstract

Searching for a target while avoiding distraction is a core function of selective attention involving both voluntary and reflexive mechanisms. Here, for the first time, we investigated the development of the interplay between voluntary and reflexive mechanisms of selective attention from childhood to early adulthood. We asked 6-, 10-, and 20-year-old participants to search for a target presented in one hemifield of a complex scene, preceded by a task-irrelevant auditory cue on either the target side (valid), the opposite side (invalid), or both sides (neutral). For each scene we computed the number of salient locations (NSL) and the target saliency (TgS). All age groups showed comparable orienting effects ("valid minus neutral" trials), indicating a similar capture of spatial attention by valid cues which was independent of age. However, only adults demonstrated a suppression of the reorienting effect ("invalid minus neutral" trials), indicating late developments in the reallocation of spatial attention toward a target following auditory distraction. The searching performance of the children (both 6- and 10-year-olds), but not of the adults, was predicted by the NSL, indicating an attraction of processing resources to salient but task-irrelevant locations in childhood; conversely, only adults showed greater performance with increased TgS in valid trials, indicating late development in the use of task-related saliency. These findings highlight qualitatively different mechanisms of selective attention operating at different ages, demonstrating important developmental changes in the interplay between voluntary and reflexive mechanisms of selective attention during visual search in complex scenes.

Impact of Language Experience on Attention to Faces in Infancy: Evidence From Unimodal and Bimodal Bilingual Infants

“…Differences in color and luminosity were minimized. Visual saliency (the sensory prominence of an object compared to its background) has been observed to influence visual attention selection mechanisms in adults ( Santangelo, 2015 ), children ( Cavallina et al, 2018 ), and infants ( Althaus and Mareschal, 2012 ). The stimulus categories used in the present study did not differ in terms of visual saliency ( Elsabbagh et al, 2013 ).…”

Artificial Faces Predict Gaze Allocation in Complex Dynamic Scenes

“…The examination of fixation preferences for real human and artificial faces can also further our understanding of mental disorders in which alterations of gaze behavior are implicated. Although children are overall more susceptible to distractions by physically salient image regions than adults (Cavallina et al, 2018), children with autism spectrum disorder display particularly decreased attention to fellow humans, especially faces (Dawson et al, 1998(Dawson et al, , 2004 and are less likely to follow gaze than their peers (Leekam et al, 2000). These difficulties do not decline with age (Baron- Cohen et al, 2001;Spezio et al, 2007) and it is generally assumed that the higher-level saliency of social features is reduced for patients with autism-spectrum disorder (Dawson et al, 1998;Klin et al, 2003;Wang et al, 2015).…”

Crossmodal spatial distraction across the lifespan

“…Although exogenous attention has been shown to be relatively stable across development (Iarocci, Enns, Randolph, & Burack, 2009;Langley et al, 2011;Waszak, Li, & Hommel, 2010), endogenous attention to task-relevant stimuli has been shown to change according to a U-shaped pattern across the lifespan, with gradual improvement from childhood to adulthood, followed by a decline into old age (Enns, Brodeur, & Trick, 1998;Plude, Enns, & Brodeur, 1994;Rueda et al, 2004;Waszak et al, 2010). These developmental changes are thought to reflect a corresponding improvement and subsequent decline in the ability to endogenously inhibit taskirrelevant information from childhood to adulthood (e.g., Cavallina, Puccio, Capurso, Bremner, & Santangelo, 2018;Dempster, 1992;Harnishfeger, 1995) to old age (e.g., Dempster, 1992;Hasher & Zacks, 1988;Poliakoff, Ashworth, Lowe, & Spence, 2006;Tipper, 1991). However, exogenous attentional capture under concurrent endogenous attention controlor, adopting more ecological terminology, the resistance to distraction when we are voluntarily engaged in an attentionallydemanding taskhas rarely been assessed across the lifespan.…”

“…In fact, the majority of the literature in this area has addressed the development of exogenous and/or endogenous attention mechanisms in separate experiments, focusing on either one mechanism or the other (e.g., Folk & Hoyer, 1992;Iarocci et al, 2009;Leclercq & Siéroff, 2013). Furthermore, many studies have focused just on development in early life, or from adulthood to old age (e.g., Cavallina et al, 2018;Poliakoff et al, 2006;Rueda et al, 2004).…”

“…To date, only a few studies have used a single paradigm to investigate exogenous capture of spatial attention under concurrent endogenous control across the entire life span (e.g., Parker & Robinson, 2018;Robinson, Hawthorn, & Rahman, 2018). This literature appears to reveal that children, in comparison to adults, show reduced endogenous control in the presence of exogenous distraction (Cavallina et al, 2018;Gumenyuk, Korzyukov, Alho, Escera, & Näätänen, 2004;Matusz et al, 2015;Parker & Robinson, 2018;Robinson et al, 2018). In studies of aging in adulthood, the available findings are not fully consistent.…”