Effects of speed and accuracy instructions on performance in a visual search task by children with good or poor...

Children rated by teachers as having good or poor attention ability carried out a visual search task in which they were required to find a series of targets in a complex display. Different groups were told to concentrate on either speed or accuracy. Previous studies using this task have consistently shown that children rated as having poor attention make more errors (false alarms to non-targets in the display), but do not differ in the time to make a correct response; this result was replicated. Though the instructions produced wide differences in speed and error rates in the expected directions, these differences were similar in both attention groups and the differences in error rates between the two groups remained unchanged. It is suggested that these findings are not compatible with the view that children with poor attention make errors primarily due to fast impulsive responding, nor with an explanation in terms of slower processing of the input by such children. An alternative explanation of the high error rates in such children is offered in terms of weak executive function resulting in poor ability to inhibit false alarms to non-targets.