Research is equivocal on whether attention orienting is atypical in autism. This study investigated two types of attention orienting in autistic people and accounted for the potential confounders of alerting level, co-occurring symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, age, and sex. Twenty-seven autistic participants…

Introduction: Our study aimed to compare the sociodemographic, diagnostic, clinical, and self-report scale data of adults diagnosed with ADHD in childhood/adolescence versus adulthood and to identify risk factors associated with delayed/missed diagnosis for ADHD. Method: Sociodemographic, clinical, and diagnostic data of 214 adults with ADHD,…

Introduction: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder with numerous hypothesized risk factors that have not yet been thoroughly investigated in many non-Western populations, including Mongolian schoolchildren. Exploring these risk factors could yield insight on which children are more likely to be…

Findings of this study indicate that children can learn to control their attending or orienting responses in the face of some distracting stimuli by the age of 6 1/2 to 7 1/2 years. This study was adapted from a dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of Yale University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree.…

Applying optimal stimulation theory, the present study explored the development of sustained attention as a dynamic process. It examined the interaction of modality and temperament over time in children and adults. Second-grade children and college-aged adults performed auditory and visual vigilance tasks. Using the Carey temperament…

Examined adult age differences in the effects of perceptual grouping on attentional performance. All three age groups were slowed by the presence of similar irrelevant information, but the elderly were slowed more than were the young adults. (Author)

Kindergarten children were pretested on attention and conservation tasks. Natural conservers performed better than nonconservers on attention tasks during the pretest. Training in attention led experimental groups to perform better than a control group on both attention and conservation tasks. Younger children seemed to benefit from attention…

The development of capacity for attention was assessed by giving children 5, 8, 9, and 12 years of age a component-selection task with instructions to attend to one component or another, or with no specific instructions regarding the stimuli. (CM)

Examined age-related changes in visual selective attention--ability to resist interference--in children 5 to 12 years old and adults. The interference effect on stimulus evaluation did not discriminate between age groups; however, the interference effect on correct response activation showed a pronounced age-related reduction, suggesting a…

Robust interference effects were found which declined with age. Manipulating discriminability of the relevant stimulus dimension resulted in large changes in sorting time, but interference effects did not vary with baseline difficulty. These results were interpreted as strongly supporting both an absolute decrement model and a developmental trend…

Significant, though moderate, correlations between some of the verbal creativity measures and the selective attention variables were found, though this relationship changed as a function of age and the type of creativity measured. (DLS)

Examined visual fixation in infants 6 months to 2 years old for fit with theory of attentional inertia. Found that fixations had lognormal distribution, heart rate decreased during a look, and heart rate returned to prestimulus levels immediately before look offset. Older children showed different looking patterns to two types of stimuli; younger…

Children (ages 5, 7, and 9 years) and young adults completed two visual attention tasks that required them to make a forced choice identification response to a target shape presented in the center of a computer screen. In the first task (high correlation condition) each target was flanked with the same distracters on 80% of the trials (valid…

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)