Wetzel Nicole, Schröger Erich, Widmann Andreas
Cognitive and Biological Psychology, Institute of Psychology, University of Leipzig Leipzig, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2016 Dec 15;7:1949. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01949. eCollection 2016.
The control of attention is an important part of our executive functions and enables us to focus on relevant information and to ignore irrelevant information. The ability to shield against distraction by task-irrelevant sounds is suggested to mature during school age. The present study investigated the developmental time course of distraction in three groups of children aged 7-10 years. Two different types of distractor sounds that have been frequently used in auditory attention research-novel environmental and pitch-deviant sounds-were presented within an oddball paradigm while children performed a visual categorization task. Reaction time measurements revealed decreasing distractor-related impairment with age. Novel environmental sounds impaired performance in the categorization task more than pitch-deviant sounds. The youngest children showed a pronounced decline of novel-related distraction effects throughout the experimental session. Such a significant decline as a result of practice was not observed in the pitch-deviant condition and not in older children. We observed no correlation between cross-modal distraction effects and performance in standardized tests of concentration and visual distraction. Results of the cross-modal distraction paradigm indicate that separate mechanisms underlying the processing of novel environmental and pitch-deviant sounds develop with different time courses and that these mechanisms develop considerably within a few years in middle childhood.
注意力控制是我们执行功能的重要组成部分，使我们能够专注于相关信息并忽略无关信息。屏蔽与任务无关声音干扰的能力在学龄期逐渐成熟。本研究调查了三组7至10岁儿童注意力分散的发展时间进程。在儿童进行视觉分类任务时，在奇偶数范式中呈现了两种在听觉注意力研究中经常使用的不同类型的干扰声音——新颖的环境声音和音高偏差声音。反应时间测量显示，与干扰物相关的损伤随年龄增长而减少。新颖的环境声音对分类任务表现的损害大于音高偏差声音。最年幼的儿童在整个实验过程中表现出与新颖性相关的干扰效应明显下降。在音高偏差条件下以及年龄较大的儿童中未观察到因练习而导致的如此显著的下降。我们未观察到跨模态干扰效应与注意力集中和视觉干扰标准化测试表现之间的相关性。跨模态干扰范式的结果表明，处理新颖环境声音和音高偏差声音的潜在机制以不同的时间进程发展，并且这些机制在童年中期的几年内有显著发展。
