Uncovering the mechanisms of real-world attentional control over the course of primary education

Abstract

Schooling may shape children's abilities to control their attention, but it is unclear if this impact extends from control over visual objects to encompass multisensory objects, which are more typical of everyday environments. We compared children across three primary school grades (Swiss 1st, 3rd, and 5th grade) on their performance on a computer game-like audio-visual attentional control task, while recording their EEG. Behavioural markers of visual attentional control were present from 3rd grade (after 2 years of schooling), whereas multisensory attentional control was not detected in any group. However, multivariate whole-brain EEG analyses ('electrical neuroimaging') revealed stable patterns of brain activity that indexed both types of attentional control, visual control in all groups, and multisensory attentional control, from 3rd grade onwards. Our findings suggest that using multivariate EEG approaches can uncover otherwise undetectable mechanisms of attentional control over visual and multisensory objects and characterise how they differ at different educational stages.

Towards understanding how we pay attention in naturalistic visual search settings

“…Contrastingly, Matusz et al (2019b) have shown evidence for both brain mechanisms underlying N2pc-like responses. These and other results of ours (Turoman et al 2021a, 2021b) provided evidence from surface-level data for different brain sources contributing to the N2pc’s, a finding that has been previously shown only in source-level data (Hopf et al 2000). These findings point to a certain limitation of the N2pc (canonically analysed), which is an EEG correlate of attentional selection, but where other analytical approaches are necessary to reveal brain mechanisms of attentional selection.…”

“…Like in the former study, each experimental trial consisted of the following sequence of arrays: base array (In Experiments 1 and 3: randomly varied between 100, 250, and 450ms; in Experiments 2 and 4: 450ms), followed by distractor array (50ms), followed by a fixation point (150ms), and finally a target array (50ms, see Figure 1A). However, compared to the original Matusz and Eimer (2011) paradigm, the number of elements was reduced from 6 to 4 and targets were reshaped to look like diamonds rather than rectangles, as Experiment 1 served as an adult control for a different, developmental study (reported in Turoman et al, 2020a, 2020b). Thus, the base array contained four differently coloured sets of closely aligned dots, each dot subtending 0.1° × 0.1° of visual angle.…”

“…Following Matusz and Eimer (2011), RT data were cleaned by discarding incorrect and missed trials, as well as RTs below 200ms and above 1000ms. Additionally, to enable more direct comparisons with the developmental study for which current Experiment 1 served as an adult control (Turoman et al, 2020a, 2020b), we have further removed trials with RTs outside 2.5SD of the individual mean RT. As a result, a total of 5% of trials across all experiments were removed.…”

“…We recently used this approach to better understand brain and cognitive mechanisms of attentional control. We revealed that distinct brain networks are active during ~N2pc time-window during visual goal-based and multisensory bottom-up attention control (across the lifespan; Turoman et al 2021a, 2021b). However, these reflect spatially-selective, lateralised brain mechanisms, partly captured by the N2pc (via the contra- and ipsilateral comparison).…”

The development of attentional control mechanisms in multisensory environments

“…In the pursuit of understanding of the development of attentional control in real-world environments, the two perspectives complement each other, creating a more complete picture on attentional control development. For this reason, we have recently carried out a child-centric EN analysis of the developing visual and multisensory attentional control ( Turoman et al, 2020b ). In short, we found that when using children as a reference point, already 5-year-olds show evidence of visual top-down attentional control, as measured by TAC, albeit not via adult-like brain networks.…”