Röer Jan P, Bell Raoul, Körner Ulrike, Buchner Axel
Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, Witten/Herdecke University, 58448 Witten, Germany.
Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2018 Aug;172:41-58. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.02.005. Epub 2018 Mar 23.
There is an ongoing debate about whether children have more problems ignoring auditory distractors than adults. This is an important empirical question with direct implications for theories making predictions about the development of selective attention. In two experiments, the disruptive effect of to-be-ignored speech on short-term memory performance of third graders, fourth graders, fifth graders, younger adults, and older adults was examined. Three auditory conditions were compared: (a) steady state sequences in which the same distractor was repeated, (b) changing state sequences in which different distractors were presented, and (c) auditory deviant sequences in which a deviant distractor was presented in a sequence of repeated distractors. According to the attentional resource view, children should exhibit larger disruption by changing and deviant sounds due to their poorer attentional control abilities compared with adults. The duplex-mechanism account proposes that the auditory deviant effect is under attentional control, whereas the changing state effect is not, and thus predicts that children should be more susceptible to auditory deviants than adults but equally disrupted by changing state sequences. According to the renewed view of age-related distraction, there should be no age differences in cross-modal auditory distraction because some of the irrelevant auditory information can be filtered out early in the processing stream. Children and adults were equally disrupted by changing and deviant speech sounds regardless of whether task difficulty was equated between age groups or not. These results are consistent with the renewed view of age-related distraction.
关于儿童在忽略听觉干扰方面是否比成年人有更多问题，目前仍存在争议。这是一个重要的实证问题，对预测选择性注意发展的理论有直接影响。在两项实验中，研究了被忽略的语音对三年级、四年级、五年级学生、年轻成年人和年长成年人短期记忆表现的干扰作用。比较了三种听觉条件：(a) 相同干扰音重复出现的稳态序列，(b) 呈现不同干扰音的变化状态序列，以及 (c) 在重复干扰音序列中呈现一个异常干扰音的听觉异常序列。根据注意资源观点，由于儿童的注意控制能力比成年人差，他们应该会因变化的声音和异常声音而表现出更大的干扰。双机制理论认为，听觉异常效应受注意控制影响，而变化状态效应则不受其影响，因此预测儿童比成年人更容易受到听觉异常的影响，但在变化状态序列中受到的干扰程度相同。根据与年龄相关的干扰的新观点，跨模态听觉干扰不应存在年龄差异，因为一些无关的听觉信息可以在处理流的早期被过滤掉。无论年龄组之间的任务难度是否等同，儿童和成年人在受到变化的和异常的语音干扰方面是相同的。这些结果与与年龄相关的干扰的新观点一致。
