Department of Philosophy, Social Sciences & Education, University of Perugia, Italy.
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK; School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK.
Cognition. 2018 Nov;180:91-98. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.07.003. Epub 2018 Jul 12.
Searching for a target while avoiding distraction is a core function of selective attention involving both voluntary and reflexive mechanisms. Here, for the first time, we investigated the development of the interplay between voluntary and reflexive mechanisms of selective attention from childhood to early adulthood. We asked 6-, 10-, and 20-year-old participants to search for a target presented in one hemifield of a complex scene, preceded by a task-irrelevant auditory cue on either the target side (valid), the opposite side (invalid), or both sides (neutral). For each scene we computed the number of salient locations (NSL) and the target saliency (TgS). All age groups showed comparable orienting effects ("valid minus neutral" trials), indicating a similar capture of spatial attention by valid cues which was independent of age. However, only adults demonstrated a suppression of the reorienting effect ("invalid minus neutral" trials), indicating late developments in the reallocation of spatial attention toward a target following auditory distraction. The searching performance of the children (both 6- and 10-year-olds), but not of the adults, was predicted by the NSL, indicating an attraction of processing resources to salient but task-irrelevant locations in childhood; conversely, only adults showed greater performance with increased TgS in valid trials, indicating late development in the use of task-related saliency. These findings highlight qualitatively different mechanisms of selective attention operating at different ages, demonstrating important developmental changes in the interplay between voluntary and reflexive mechanisms of selective attention during visual search in complex scenes.
在避免分心的情况下寻找目标是选择性注意的核心功能，涉及到自愿和反射机制。在这里，我们首次研究了从儿童到成年早期，选择性注意的自愿和反射机制之间相互作用的发展。我们要求 6 岁、10 岁和 20 岁的参与者在复杂场景的一侧呈现目标，在目标侧（有效）、对侧（无效）或两侧（中性）呈现与任务无关的听觉提示，然后搜索该目标。对于每个场景，我们计算了显著位置的数量（NSL）和目标显著性（TgS）。所有年龄组都表现出相似的定向效应（“有效减去中性”试验），表明有效提示对空间注意力的捕获相似，与年龄无关。然而，只有成年人表现出对再定向效应的抑制（“无效减去中性”试验），表明在听觉干扰后，空间注意力重新分配的能力发展较晚。儿童（6 岁和 10 岁）的搜索表现，但不是成年人的搜索表现，可以通过 NSL 来预测，这表明在儿童时期，处理资源会被吸引到显著但与任务无关的位置；相反，只有成年人在有效试验中随着 TgS 的增加表现出更好的性能，这表明在复杂场景的视觉搜索中，与任务相关的显著性的使用发展较晚。这些发现强调了在不同年龄阶段操作的选择性注意的不同机制，证明了在复杂场景的视觉搜索中，选择性注意的自愿和反射机制之间的相互作用发生了重要的发展变化。
