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Nonverbal spatially selective attention in 4- and 5-year-old children
Lisa D Sanders1, Benjamin H Zobel
1Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Behavior Program, Tobin Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. lsanders@psych.umass.edu
Insights
Young children and adults can both process attended sounds, showing similar early brain responses. Developmental differences in auditory attention may involve acoustic factors and maturity.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Auditory Perception
Background:
- Auditory attention allows individuals to focus on relevant sounds amidst distractions.
- Event-related potentials (ERPs) measure brain activity in response to auditory stimuli.
- Previous research suggests similar timing of attention effects in children and adults, but developmental differences remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate developmental differences in auditory attention.
- To examine how acoustic characteristics and maturity influence auditory evoked potentials.
- To determine if young children can modulate auditory processing based on spatial attention with nonverbal sounds.
Main Methods:
- Participants (adults and children) listened to two simultaneous soundscapes.
- They were instructed to attend to one soundscape and detect targets within it.
- Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to measure brain responses to attended and unattended probes.
Main Results:
- Both adults and children showed an early negative difference (Nd) in ERPs for attended probes.
- Adults exhibited a positivity following the Nd for attended probes.
- Children displayed another negativity after the Nd for attended probes, suggesting different neural processing.
Conclusions:
- The neural mechanisms for auditory attention are present in young children.
- Developmental variations in auditory evoked potentials are influenced by attention, acoustics, and maturity.
- Early auditory processing is modulated by attention even with complex, nonverbal soundscapes.
Abstract:
Under some conditions 4- and 5-year-old children can differentially process sounds from attended and unattended locations. In fact, the latency of spatially selective attention effects on auditory processing as measured with event-related potentials (ERPs) is quite similar in young children and adults. However, it is not clear if developmental differences in the polarity, distribution, and duration of attention effects are best attributed to acoustic characteristics, availability of non-spatial attention cues, task demands, or domain. In the current study adults and children were instructed to attend to one of two simultaneously presented soundscapes (e.g., city sounds or night sounds) to detect targets (e.g., car horn or owl hoot) in the attended channel only. Probes presented from the same location as the attended soundscape elicited a larger negativity by 80 ms after onset in both adults and children. This initial negative difference (Nd) was followed by a larger positivity for attended probes in adults and another negativity for attended probes in children. The results indicate that the neural systems by which attention modulates early auditory processing are available for young children even when presented with nonverbal sounds. They also suggest important interactions between attention, acoustic characteristics, and maturity on auditory evoked potentials.
