Development of endogenous orienting of attention in school-age children

Leclercq, Virginie; Siéroff, Éric

doi:10.1080/09297049.2012.682568

Cited by 24 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 77 publications

(124 reference statements)

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“…First, when analyzing our entire sample together, we found that both orientation sensitivity and spatial attention improve gradually up until around age 20, consistent with previous findings (Brodeur & Enns, 1997;Leclercq & Siéroff, 2013;Schul et al, 2003). Although our sample included only 6 participants over age 50 (aging was not our focus), we observed no decline in task performance or attentional selection in the later years (Folk & Hoyer, 1992;Hartley, Kieley, & Slabach, 1990).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

The link between reading ability and visual spatial attention across development

White

Boynton

Yeatman

2019

Cortex

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Interacting with a cluttered and dynamic environment requires making decisions about visual information at relevant locations while ignoring irrelevant locations. Typical adults can do this with covert spatial attention: prioritizing particular visual field locations even without moving the eyes. Deficits of covert spatial attention have been implicated in developmental dyslexia, a specific reading disability. Previous studies of children with dyslexia, however, have been complicated by group differences in overall task ability that are difficult to distinguish from selective spatial attention. Here, we used a single-fixation visual search task to estimate orientation discrimination thresholds with and without an informative spatial cue in a large sample (N=123) of people ranging in age from 5 to 70 years and with a wide range of reading abilities. We assessed the efficiency of attentional selection via the cueing effect: the difference in log thresholds with and without the spatial cue. Across our whole sample, both absolute thresholds and the cueing effect gradually improved throughout childhood and adolescence.Compared to typical readers, individuals with dyslexia had higher thresholds (worse orientation discrimination) as well as smaller cueing effects (weaker attentional selection).Those differences in dyslexia were especially pronounced prior to age 20, when basic visual function is still maturing. Thus, in line with previous theories, literacy skills are associated with the development of selective spatial attention.In this study, we are interested in how covert spatial attention differs between individuals with and without dyslexia, in childhood as well as in adulthood. Because our goal is to measure visual task performance across a wide age range, we must first consider more general developmental changes in visual perception and attention. The development of covert spatial attentionSince the 1980s, psychologists have studied the development of covert spatial attention using spatial cueing paradigms . Nearly all such studies assess spatial attention by comparing reaction times (RTs) across different cue conditions (e.g., valid vs. invalid). The question is how the differences in RT, which index attention effects, change across development. There is a general consensus that exogenous (automatic, stimulus-driven) cueing effects are present from at least pre-school age and are stable through the lifespan. Endogenous (voluntary, top-down) cueing effects show more gradual developmental change, suggesting an increase in strategic control over spatial attention.Beyond that, there is little agreement on the details of the time course and which internal mechanisms are changing. Some studies claim that endogenous attention becomes "adult-like" by age 10 A general challenge in this type of study is to separate developmental change in a specific mechanism of attention from developmental change in overall task performance. Younger participants tend to respond slower and less accurately to the same stimulus as older...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

The link between reading ability and visual spatial attention across development

White

Boynton

Yeatman

2019

Cortex

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“…Beginning readers found it difficult to inhibit the biased distribution of attention toward the right visual field, maybe because of young children's well-documented difficulties with inhibitory control (Booth et al, 2003;Bunge, Dudukovic, Thomason, Vaidya, & Gabrieli, 2002;Casey et al, 1997;Durston et al, 2002;Leclercq & Siéroff, 2013). When the target is nonverbal (Experiment 2), the rightward bias is absent because the left hemisphere may not be specifically activated.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Attentional Processing of Letter Strings by Children

Leclercq¹,

Siéroff

2014

Child Neuropsychology

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Reading a letter string requires attentional orienting toward the beginning of the string (left-dominant orientation), followed by orienting along the string. These attentional-orienting processes differ according to the lexicality of the letter string: Sequential processes apply when reading nonwords or pseudowords, while words can be processed more globally. The aim of this study was to evaluate the development of these attentional processes involved in reading. We conducted two experiments in 6- (first grade), 7- (second grade), and 9-year-old (fourth grade) children, using a procedure that required the detection of a letter (Experiment 1) or a nonletter (Experiment 2) target in a string of five characters. The target character could occur in the second (left) or fourth (right) position in the string. Results showed an advantage for left nonletter targets as early as age 6 and of left letter targets as early as age 7. In 6-year-olds, only good readers detected a left letter target faster than a right letter target; others detected a right letter target faster. Thus, dominant orienting toward the beginning of the letter string is not fully developed in children before the second year of reading. A possibility is that beginning readers have difficulties inhibiting an attention-orienting bias toward the right visual field in linguistic tasks. The results also showed that the lexicality effect on these attentional processes develops gradually until the fourth year of reading. We believe that the procedure used in this study will be very valuable for evaluating attentional difficulties during reading acquisition.

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“…While to our knowledge, no prior studies comparable to ours have been conducted, a few studies have reported that children as young as age 6 are capable of covert spatial orienting (using detection), similarly to adults. But some performance differences have been reported in comparison with older children and adults (see Leclercq & Sieroff, 2013). In particular, performance accuracy and speed on these tasks improve with age (Schul et al, 2003) and are compromised in children who had experienced bilateral stimulus deprivation from congenital cataracts (Goldberg et al, 2001).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention in visually typical and amblyopic children

Ramesh

Steele²,

Kiorpes

2020

Journal of Vision

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Amblyopia is a cortical visual disorder caused by unequal visual input to the brain from the two eyes during development. Amblyopes show reduced visual acuity and contrast sensitivity and abnormal binocularity, as well as more "global" perceptual losses, such as figure-ground segregation and global form integration. Currently, there is no consensus on the neural basis for these higher-order perceptual losses. One contributing factor could be that amblyopes have deficiencies in attention, such that the attentional processes that control the selection of information favor the better eye. Previous studies in amblyopic adults are conflicting as to whether attentional deficits exist. However, studies where intact attentional ability has been shown to exist were conducted in adults; it is possible that it was acquired through experience. To test this hypothesis, we studied attentional processing in amblyopic children. We examined covert endogenous attention using a classical spatial cueing paradigm in amblyopic and visually typical 5-to 10-year old children. We found that all children, like adults, independently of visual condition, benefited from attentional cueing: They performed significantly better on trials with an informative (valid) cue than with the uninformative (neutral) cue. Response latencies were also significantly shorter for the valid cue condition. No statistically significant difference was found between the performance of the amblyopic and the visually typical children or between dominant and nondominant eyes of all children. The results showed that covert spatial attention is intact in amblyopic and visually typical children and is therefore not likely to account for higher-order perceptual losses in amblyopic children.

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Development of endogenous orienting of attention in school-age children

Cited by 24 publications

References 77 publications

The link between reading ability and visual spatial attention across development

The link between reading ability and visual spatial attention across development

Attentional Processing of Letter Strings by Children

Attention in visually typical and amblyopic children

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