Selective attention and attention switching: towards a unified developmental approach

We review and relate two literatures on the development of attention in children: one concerning flexible attention switching and the other concerning selective attention. The first is a growing literature on preschool children's performances in an attention-switching task indicating that children become more flexible in their attentional control during the preschool years. The second literature encompasses a large and robust set of phenomena for the same developmental period that indicates a protracted course of development for selective attention in children. We ask whether developmental changes in processes of selective attention may contribute to more flexible attention switching. We consider the two sets of phenomena with respect to this question and propose an empirical agenda for their joint study that may lead ultimately to a unified account of the development of selective attention and attention switching.