The effect of verbal priming of visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children

The socialization of visual attention: Training effects of verbal attention guidance in urban German children.

“…The materials necessary to replicate the findings, as well as the data and code necessary to reproduce the analyses presented in this article are available in the Open Science Framework at https:// osf.io/d3s2k (Jurkat et al, 2024). The analyses presented here were not preregistered.…”

“…Following up on this, the present study aimed to extend previous research (Jurkat et al, 2021) by using a training approach in order to investigate whether culture-specific verbal attention guidance that is provided over a longer period of time has the potential to produce more enduring effects on children's attention styles. More specifically, we measured the effects of verbal attention guidance after participants repeatedly engaged in priming sessions accentuating either analytic or holistic processing over a period of several days.…”

“…The way we visually approach the world around us is linked to the way we talk about it, as proposed by recent research exploring verbal attention guidance as one potential mechanism underlying the development of culture-specific visual attention styles (i.e., analytic vs. holistic attention; Senzaki & Shimizu, 2020, 2022). Although a basic assumption in these studies is that children’s engagement in culture-specific verbal interactional routines eventually leads to lasting effects on children’s visual attention, most studies so far have focused on measuring immediate short-term effects (Jurkat et al, 2021; Senzaki & Shimizu, 2022). To address this research gap, the present study used a training approach to investigate whether culture-specific verbal attention guidance has the power to influence 6- to 7-year-old urban German children’s analytic versus holistic attention patterns across various indicators over a longer period of time.…”

“…Recent studies aimed to further scrutinize the causal role of verbal attention guidance in influencing children’s attention styles beyond these correlational and quasi-experimental approaches (Jurkat et al, 2021; Senzaki & Shimizu, 2022). For example, Jurkat et al (2021) demonstrated the effectiveness of verbal inputs in an experimental study using a priming manipulation.…”

“…Recent studies aimed to further scrutinize the causal role of verbal attention guidance in influencing children’s attention styles beyond these correlational and quasi-experimental approaches (Jurkat et al, 2021; Senzaki & Shimizu, 2022). For example, Jurkat et al (2021) demonstrated the effectiveness of verbal inputs in an experimental study using a priming manipulation. More specifically, when primed with verbal descriptions either accentuating the object in a picture (i.e., facilitating analytic processing) or the picture’s context (i.e., facilitating holistic processing), children between 4 and 9 years old from urban Germany showed a corresponding perceptual pattern in a subsequent eye-tracking task and picture description task (Jurkat et al, 2021).…”