Examined ways in which irrelevant variations within a stimulus set interfered with performances of second and fifth graders and adults in a selective attention task. Stimuli were constructed from spatially integrated dimensions in experiment 1 and spatially separated dimensions in experiment 2. Developmental differences in perceived structure were…

Examined exogenous orienting among infants between 7 and 21 weeks of age in 2 experiments using display with multiple potential attention targets. Found that as early as 7 weeks of age, sensitivity for a small moving stimulus can be significantly influenced by the simultaneous presence of competing attention targets. Found large increases in…

This study investigated attention to and recognition of components in compound stimuli among infants and preschoolers. Oddity tasks with preschoolers and familiarization/novelty-preference tasks with infants demonstrated successful discrimination among stimuli components on basis of edge property information. Matching tasks with preschoolers and…

Discusses changes occurring in two-, four-, and six-month-old infants' visual attention span, through a series of experiments examining their ability to orient to peripheral visual stimuli. The results obtained were consistent with the hypothesis that infants get faster with age in shifting attention to a spatial location. (AA)