Developmental Aspects of Temporal and Spatial Visual Attention: Insights from the Attentional Blink and Visual Search Tasks

Abstract

Frontal regions of the human cortex are thought to reach full maturation last in the course of development. The present report examines such development in the context of attentional tasks in the temporal (e.g., the attentional blink, AB, paradigm) and spatial (e.g., the visual search, VS, paradigm) domains. Here we show that the recovery from AB is progressively longer with younger age by studying 7-, 12-, 15-year-olds, and adults participating on a modified AB task. By contrast, we found no difference between 7-year-olds and adults in a VS task using the same target stimuli as in the AB task. This differential pattern of development between temporal and spatial attention is discussed in relation to visual working memory development, clinical populations, and general mechanisms of cortical development.

Age-Related Changes in Temporal Allocation of Visual Attention: Evidence From the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) Paradigm

“…As regards the amplitude of the AB, we expected that it will decrease with increasing age. This result was observed by Garrad et al (2011) in their RSVP task. The magnitude of interferences has also been demonstrated to increase from childhood to adulthood in spatial selection tasks (Enns & Akhar, 1989).…”

“…Ruskin and Kayes (1990) also noted a reduction in response latencies from childhood to adulthood in a conjunction visual search task (5-year old children, 10-year-old children and adults were tested). In contrast, Garrad-Cole, Shapiro and Thierry's (2011) study of the effect of display size in a conjunction search task (analyses of mean slope/RT ratios for each participant) did not reveal any developmental differences between 7-year-old children and adults.…”

“…Based on previous research (Dye & Bavelier, 2010;Garrad-Cole et al, 2011), we expected to find age-related changes in the width or duration of the AB (with the possibility that the youngest age group would not have recovered their attention abilities after 800 ms, see Garrard-Cole et al, 2011). In addition, we wanted to determine whether the temporal displacement of the AB in young children also affects the peak position (toward later lags) and the sparing effect (spreading over lag 1 only).…”

Is the impairment in temporal allocation of visual attention in children with ADHD related to a developmental delay or a structural cognitive deficit?

“…the number of lag positions at which performance in the two-target condition was worse than in the single-target condition) provides information on both the dynamics of gating mechanisms (the speed of reopening) and the amount of attentional resources available. According to the developmental hypothesis, we expected (i) the AB to be longer in healthy 8-year-olds than in healthy 11-year-olds and longer in older healthy 11-year-old children than in healthy adults (see Garrad-Cole, Shapiro, & Thierry, 2011); and (ii) a similar AB duration in 11-year-old children with ADHD and healthy 8-year-old children. (c) The timing of the AB minimum (i.e.…”

“…In many studies of the AB, groups of children have been broadly assessed as controls in order to highlight AB impairments in children suffering from pathologies such as dyslexia or ADHD (Li et al, 2004;Mason et al, 2005;Visser, Boden, & Giaschi, 2004). To the best of our knowledge, only three studies have focused on the developmental time course of visual attention in healthy children (Dye & Bavelier, 2010;Garrad-Cole et al, 2011;Shapiro & Garrad-Cole, 2003). Our results are in line with these studies, which show that the AB shortens with age (when comparing 7-year-olds and 12-year-olds in the study by GarradCole et al, 2011, for example).…”