1 research outputs found
Developing attentional control in naturalistic dynamic road crossing situations
In the last 20 years, there has been increasing interest in studying visual attentional processes under
more natural conditions. In the present study, we propose to determine the critical age at which
children show similar to adult performance and attentional control in a visually guided task; in a
naturalistic dynamic and socially relevant context: road crossing. We monitored visual exploration
and crossing decisions in adults and children aged between 5 and 15 while they watched road trafc
videos containing a range of trafc densities with or without pedestrians. 5–10 year old (y/o) children
showed less systematic gaze patterns. More specifcally, adults and 11–15y/o children look mainly at
the vehicles’ appearing point, which is an optimal location to sample diagnostic information for the
task. In contrast, 5–10y/os look more at socially relevant stimuli and attend to moving vehicles further
down the trajectory when the trafc density is high. Critically, 5-10y/o children also make an increased
number of crossing decisions compared to 11–15y/os and adults. Our fndings reveal a critical shift
around 10y/o in attentional control and crossing decisions in a road crossing task