Citation

Coté CA. Percept. Mot. Skills 2015; 120(2): 381-396.

Affiliation

1 The University of Scranton.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.2466/22.PMS.120v13x9

PMID

25871471

Abstract

-Visual fixation patterns were analyzed to gain insight into developmental changes in attention allocation in a cross-modal task. Two patterns that have been associated with increased task difficulty, gaze aversion and fixation duration, were recorded using an eye-tracker. In this exploratory study, 37 elementary age children (M age 7-10 yr.) and 23 undergraduates engaged in visual-only and haptic-visual shape-matching tasks. Theoretical assumptions underlying this study are that children have greater limitations on attention capacity compared to adults, and that a task presented in the cross-modal condition would pose special demands on this capacity. A 2 × 2 (uni- or cross-modal × age group) repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze both gaze aversion and average fixation duration. Children averted gaze significantly more during the cross-modal condition, supporting the idea that children use gaze aversion as an attention-shifting mechanism. Mean fixation duration increased for both groups in the cross-modal condition. Due to the small number and limited age range of the children as well as the limited number of task items, interpretations are made with caution.

Language: en