Children can implicitly, but not voluntarily, direct attention in time

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Children develop the ability to use spatial cues for attention around age 4.
• Research has not yet explored children's capacity for voluntary temporal attention using predictive cues.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if children can voluntarily orient their attention in time using symbolic cues.
• To compare children's and adults' use of spatial and temporal cues in an attention task.

Main Methods:

• A spatial and temporal attention task was administered to 30 children (avg. age 11) and 32 adults (avg. age 27).
• Symbolic spatial and temporal cues predicted the location or timing of imperative targets.

Main Results:

• Adults utilized both spatial and temporal cues, showing slower responses to invalid cues.
• Children used spatial cues effectively but did not show slowed responses to invalid temporal cues, indicating a lack of voluntary temporal attention.
• Both groups exhibited implicit temporal expectations, such as the variable foreperiod and sequential effects.

Conclusions:

• Children's voluntary use of symbolic temporal cues is delayed compared to spatial cue use and implicit temporal expectation.
• Developmental trajectory shows a lag in deliberate temporal attention skills relative to spatial attention and implicit temporal processing.