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Selective attention and active engagement in young children
1Laboratory for Research on the Neuroscience of Autism, Children's Hospital San Diego, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, USA. natacha@ucsd.edu
Developmental Neuropsychology
|March 29, 2003
Summary
Preschoolers
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Cognitive neuroscience
Background:
- Attention and related skills undergo significant neural changes during early development.
- Preschoolers often struggle with continuous performance tests, but the underlying reasons (selective response vs. attention maintenance) are unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the development of vigilance and reaction time skills in preschool-aged children.
- To determine the age at which these skills become reliably measurable.
Main Methods:
- 52 children aged 3.5 to 5.5 years performed two vigilance-type reaction time tasks.
- Tasks involved short-duration, continuous visual stimuli presented in short blocks.
Main Results:
- 46% of children under 4.5 years struggled with task demands.
- Children under 4.5 years made significantly more omission errors than older children.
- High active engagement was observed across all participants.
Conclusions:
- Vigilance task skills, including response initiation and selection, are still developing in preschoolers.
- These skills can be reliably measured in children after 4.5 years of age.