The Facilitation of Selective Attention in Preschoolers

Abstract

Allocation of attention was examined on a selective attention task in which some items were relevant (i.e., their locations should be remembered) and some were irrelevant. 100 4- and 5-year-olds formed 4 experimental conditions and 1 control group. 3 experimental groups had 1 added feature to aid selectivity (fewer stimuli, increased perceptual salience of the difference between relevant and irrelevant stimuli, or extra reminders of the locations of relevant and irrelevant stimuli). The fourth experimental condition included all features. A story and explicit instructions identified which objects were relevant. During study times, children opened doors (marked with cages or houses) of a box to reveal animals or household objects. Selectivity (opening mainly relevant doors) was high, compared to previous studies using no story with 6-year-olds, even in the control condition. Selectivity increased significantly beyond the level in the control condition only when all facilitative features were combined. Selectivity was not significantly related to recall. This outcome, in conjunction with previous research, suggests a lag between the production of a strategy and its facilitative effect on recall.

Differential allocation of study time: Incomplete compensation for the difficulty of the materials

“…In the tasks used by Miller et al (e.g., Miller & Weis, 1981;Woody-Ramsey & Miller, 1988;see Miller, 1990) children were told which items were relevant for the trial. In that case, adequate performance involved not taking into account the irrelevant stimuli and only studying the items proposed by the experimenter.…”

Children adapt their questions to achieve efficient search

“…For example, Davidson (1991a) presented children with an information board from which they could choose which information to reveal prior to making a decision. She found that 2nd grade children were generally exhaustive and inefficient in their search, whereas 5th and 8th grade children implemented more demanding but more efficient strategies (see also Davidson & Hudson, 1988;Gregan-Paxton & Roedder John, 1995;Wellman, 1985;Woody-Ramsey & Miller, 1988). Although our task differed considerably in its form (i.e., asking questions) and in the particular manipulations of information structure (e.g., the frequency distribution over hypotheses), these findings are in line with the idea that with age, children are better able to identify and implement efficient strategies for information search (see also DeMarie-Dreblow & Miller, 1988).…”

The effects of spatial configuration on preschoolers' attention strategies, selective attention, and incidental learning

“…Efforts to promote preschoolers' use of selective attention strategies have involved basing the task within a story, reducing the number of relevant items to be recalled, and highlighting the distinctions between relevant and irrelevant items through differential colouring of the doors. These manipulations, in combination, have increased the selectivity of preschoolers' strategies with no corresponding effect on their selective attention (Woody-Ramsey and Miller, 1988).…”