The development of auditory attention in children

Abstract

In this paper we review the development of four components of auditory attention: arousal, orienting, selective attention and sustained attention. We focus especially on the processes responsible for the selection of specific stimuli for further processing because these are essential for learning and development. Although much work still needs to be done, there is evidence of developmental change in some of the components of attention, especially early in infancy. Later developmental improvements seem to be primarily attributable to higher cognitive processes, such as motivation, strategy development and implementation, and voluntary direction and regulation of attention. INTRODUCTIONAttention is important for most, if not all, information processing. Attentional processes are involved in determining which internal and external stimuli are singled out for further processing and, consequently, which stimuli warrant a response. This process of selecting stimuli from an extremely complex, ever changing, multisensory environment is determined not only by the physical characteristics of the stimuli themselves, but also by the individual interests, motives, and cognitive strategies of the person perceiving the stimuli. Because attention is involved in the process of selection, it plays an important role in the establishment of flexible, adaptive behavior. The distribution of attention is critical for learning and development. Identifying and attending to the important aspects of the environment are essential for the acquisition of new skills. For example, investigators have shown that infants attend to the stress patterns of language and have argued that this facilitates language acquisition (1). The selection of stimuli for further processing also has implications for what information is stored in memory and the level of detail associated with particular memory traces.Central to our conception of attention are the processes responsible for the selection of specific stimuli for further processing. This selection can be automatic, as in the orienting elicited by a novel stimulus, or active, as in the search for a designated target in a set of stimuli during a selective attention task. In addition to selection, individuals must be alert (or exhibit at least some minimal level of arousal) and must be able to sustain an attentional focus for effective information processing and optimal learning. These four components of attention: arousal, orienting, selective attention, and sustained attention, are important to most models of attention (for example, 2-5) and will be used to organize our discussion of the development of attention.Attention has been studied extensively in infants and adults, as evidenced by the number of recent books on the subject (for example, 2, 5-12). However, attention

Scope of attention, control of attention, and intelligence in children and adults

“…Therefore, it appears that the attention-benefit ratio reflects the ability or willingness to follow the attention instructions, not the ability to remember items in the lists. One must note that this pattern of results does not imply that young children cannot control attention; indeed, other literature suggests that they can do so to some extent (e.g., Gomes et al, 2000;Lane & Pearson, 1982). The result suggests only that making use of selective attention for mnemonic purposes demanded a level of control that was generally beyond what most of the children-and many of the adults-could manage.…”

Issues in human auditory development

“…Third, it is possible that infants have stable representations of intensity and that they can separate the overlapping components of sound coming from different sources, but that they are unable to selectively attend to one sound while ignoring another (Gomes, Molholm, Christodoulou, Ritter, & Cowan, 2000). Bargones and Werner (1994) found that while adults expecting to hear a low-intensity tone at one frequency did not hear tones at other unexpected frequencies, infants detected expected and unexpected frequencies equally well.…”

Event-related potentials reflect spectral differences in speech and non-speech stimuli in children and adults

“…The N1 is mostly sensitive to sound audibility and salience and parallels behavioral sound detection thresholds (Martin et al, 1997). Based on its known functional significance in adults as well as late emergence and specific elicitation conditions in children (long inter-stimulus intervals, ISI), we have suggested (Èeponienë et al, 2002; Èeponienë et al, 2005) that, at least partially, the N1 emerges as a complementing and balancing mechanism to the development of focused and sustained attention (Gomes et al, 2000;Coch et al, 2005b;Wible et al, 2005). That is, the auditory N1 may reflect a "gate-keeping" mechanism for sensory information, which depends on the load and direction of the ongoing mental activity.…”