Citation

Plebanek DJ, Sloutsky VM. Psychol. Sci. 2017; 28(6): 723-732.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797617693005

PMID

28388275

Abstract

One of the lawlike regularities of psychological science is that of developmental progression-an increase in sensorimotor, cognitive, and social functioning from childhood to adulthood. Here, we report a rare violation of this law, a developmental reversal in attention. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds ( n = 34) and adults ( n = 35) performed a change-detection task that included externally cued and uncued shapes. Whereas the adults outperformed the children on the cued shapes, the children outperformed the adults on the uncued shapes. In Experiment 2, the same participants completed a visual search task, and their memory for search-relevant and search-irrelevant information was tested. The young children outperformed the adults with respect to search-irrelevant features. This demonstration of a paradoxical property of early attention deepens current understanding of the development of attention. It also has implications for understanding early learning and cognitive development more broadly.

Language: en

Keywords

attention; cognitive development; learning; open data; open materials