The developmental trajectories of selective and divided attention were examined in relation to the processing of hierarchically integrated stimuli. The participants included children in 4 age groups (6, 8, 10, and 12 years) and a group of young adults (24 years) who completed 2 computer-based attention tasks. In the selective attention task, the…

Cognition can unfold with little regard to the events taking place in the environment, and such self-generated mental activity poses a specific set of challenges for its scientific analysis in both cognitive science and neuroscience. One problem is that the spontaneous onset of self-generated mental activity makes it hard to distinguish the events…

Children today face increasingly high stress levels, impacting their well-being. Schools can play a crucial role in teaching social and emotional skills; therefore there is a need to identify effective interventions. This mixed-methods study of 124 elementary school students from three New Zealand schools aimed to (1) assess if children…

Caparos and Linnell (2009, 2010) used a variable-separation flanker paradigm to show that (a) when cognitive load is low, increasing perceptual load causes spatial attention to focus and (b) when perceptual load is high, decreasing cognitive load causes spatial attention to focus. Here, we tested whether the effects of perceptual and cognitive…

The substantial distractor interference obtained for small displays when the target appears alone is reduced in large displays when the target is embedded among neutral letters. This finding has been interpreted as reflecting low-load and high-load processing, respectively, thereby supporting the theory of perceptual load (Lavie & Tsal, 1994).…

This study examined the selective attention abilities of a simple, artificial, evolved agent and considered implications of the agent's performance for theories of selective attention and action. The agent processed two targets in continuous time, catching one and then the other. This task required many cognitive operations, including prioritizing…

Interest in mindfulness-based interventions for children and adolescents is burgeoning, bringing with it the need for validated instruments to assess mindfulness in youths. The present studies were designed to validate among adolescents a measure of mindfulness previously validated for adults (e.g., Brown & Ryan, 2003), which we herein call…

Inattentional blindness is the failure to detect unexpected events when attention is otherwise engaged. Previous research indicates that inattentional blindness increases as perceptual demands intensify. The authors present 6 cuing experiments that manipulated both the perceptual demands of a primary letter-naming task and the expectations of the…

Perceptual load theory offers a resolution to the long-standing early vs. late selection debate over whether task-irrelevant stimuli are perceived, suggesting that irrelevant perception depends upon the perceptual load of task-relevant processing. However, previous evidence for this theory has relied on RTs and neuroimaging. Here we tested the…

Purpose: Previous studies (e.g., G. Wulf, M. HoB, & W. Prinz, 1998; G. Wulf, B. Lauterbach, & T. Toole, 1999; for a review, see G. Wulf & W. Prinz, 2001) have reported that limb motor performance is enhanced when individuals adopt an external focus (focusing on the effect of the movement) versus an internal focus of attention (focusing on body…

The aim of this paper was to study the phenomenon of joint visual attention between human infants and adults. (Author/DB)

Reviews the literature dealing with the loci and parameters of visual selective attention. It is maintained that input selection can be found at several points in the course of processing. Specifically, a case is made for very early perceptual selection, called perceptual tuning, which can be based on higher-order conceptual or structural stimulus…

Describes experimental approaches used to demonstrate perception without awareness. Maintains that experimental findings based on all four approaches lead to the conclusion that stimuli are perceived even when observers are unaware of the stimuli. Asserts that future research should assess the functions of information perceived without awareness…

Investigated mechanisms underlying reductions in susceptibility to interference from irrelevant information that are evident in the developing child. Used two experiments requiring attention to one stimulus out of many. Found that age changes in selective attention are mediated to an important extent by changes in the speed and efficiency of…

This report relates current attentional research and theory to the development of skilled performance, with emphasis on how performance changes with practice. Dual process attention theory is reviewed, and the distinction between automatic and controlled processing is examined. The changing interactions between automatic and controlled processing…