Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 Saint George Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3G3.
Dev Sci. 2010 Jan 1;13(1):161-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00875.x.
Visual scenes contain many statistical regularities such as the likely identity and location of objects that are present; with experience, such regularities can be encoded and can ultimately facilitate the deployment of spatial attention to important locations. Memory-guided attention has been extensively examined in adults with the 'contextual cueing' paradigm and has been linked to specific neural substrates - a medial temporal lobe (MTL)-frontoparietal network. However, it currently remains unknown when this ability comes 'online' during development. Thus, we examined the performance of school-aged children on an age-appropriate version of the contextual cueing paradigm. Children searched for a target fish among distractor fish in new displays and in 'old' displays on a touchscreen computer. Old displays repeated across blocks of trials and thus provided an opportunity for prior experience with the invariant configuration of the stimuli to guide attentional deployment. We found that over time children searched old displays significantly faster than new displays, thus revealing intact memory-guided attention and presumed function of an MTL-frontoparietal network in 5- to 9-year-olds. More generally, our findings suggest that children are remarkably sensitive to the inherent structure of their visual environment and this enables attentional deployment to become more efficient with experience.
视觉场景包含许多统计规律，例如存在的物体的可能身份和位置；随着经验的积累，这些规律可以被编码，最终有助于将空间注意力集中到重要位置。在成年人中，使用“语境提示”范式广泛研究了记忆引导的注意力，并与特定的神经基质——内侧颞叶（MTL）-额顶叶网络相关联。然而，目前尚不清楚这种能力在发育过程中何时“上线”。因此，我们在适合儿童年龄的语境提示范式版本上检查了学龄儿童的表现。儿童在触摸屏计算机上的新显示和“旧”显示中从干扰鱼中搜索目标鱼。旧显示在试验块中重复出现，因此为利用先前对刺激不变配置的经验来指导注意力的分配提供了机会。我们发现，随着时间的推移，儿童搜索旧显示的速度明显快于新显示，从而揭示了 5 至 9 岁儿童的完整的记忆引导注意力和假定的 MTL-额顶叶网络功能。更一般地说，我们的研究结果表明，儿童对其视觉环境的固有结构非常敏感，这使得注意力的分配随着经验的积累而变得更加高效。
