Information processes of task-switching and modality-shifting across development

Developmental research on flexible attentional control in young children has often focused on the role of attention in task-switching in a unimodal context. In real life, children must master the art of switching attention not only between task demands, but also between sensory modalities. Previous study has shown that young children can be efficient at switching between unimodal tasks when the situation allows, incurring no greater task-switching costs than adults. However, young children may still experience a greater demand to shift attention between modalities than older participants. To address this, we tested 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds and adults on a novel cross-modal task-switching paradigm involving multisensory detection tasks. While we found age differences in absolute reaction time and accuracy, young children and adults both exhibited strikingly similar effects in task-switching, modality-shifting, and the interaction between them. Young children did not exhibit a greater attentional bottleneck on either the task level, or on the modality level; thus, the evidence suggests that young children engaged in similar cognitive operations in the current cross-modal tasks to adult participants. It appears that cognitive operations in multisensory task configuration are relatively mature between 4 and 6 years old

Individual Differences in Dealing With Classroom Noise Disturbances

Classrooms are noisy: when children are engaged in solo work, they also hear background babble, noise from outdoor, and people moving around. Few studies investigating the effects of noise on academic tasks use naturalistic stimuli. Questions also remain regarding why some children are more impaired by noise than others. This study compared primary school children's performance at three academic tasks (text recall, reading comprehension, mathematics) in silence, and while hearing irrelevant verbal noise (storytelling, n = 33) or mixed noise (outdoor noise, movement, babble, n = 31). We found that noise does not impair overall performance. Children might use compensatory strategies (e.g., re-reading) to reach the same level of performance in silence and noise. Individual differences in selective attention and working memory were not related to the impact of noise, with one exception: children with lower working memory were more impaired by noise when doing mathematics. Replication on a larger sample is needed

Joint perception: gaze and social context

We found that the way people looked at images was influenced by their belief that others were looking too. If participants believed that an unseen other person was also looking at what they could see, it shifted the balance of their gaze between negative and positive images. The direction of this shift depended upon whether participants thought that later they would be compared against the other person or would be collaborating with them. Changes in the social context influenced both gaze and memory processes, and were not due just to participants' belief that they are looking at the same images, but also to the belief that they are doing the same task. We believe that the phenomenon of joint perception reveals the pervasive and subtle effect of social context upon cognitive and perceptual processes

Individual differences in infant fixation duration relate to attention and behavioral control in childhood

Individual differences in fixation duration are considered a reliable measure of attentional control in adults. However, the degree to which individual differences in fixation duration in infancy (0–12 months) relate to temperament and behavior in childhood is largely unknown. In the present study, data were examined from 120 infants (mean age = 7.69 months, SD = 1.90) who previously participated in an eye-tracking study. At follow-up, parents completed age-appropriate questionnaires about their child’s temperament and behavior (mean age of children = 41.59 months, SD = 9.83). Mean fixation duration in infancy was positively associated with effortful control (β = 0.20, R2 = .02, p = .04) and negatively with surgency (β = −0.37, R2 = .07, p = .003) and hyperactivity-inattention (β = −0.35, R2 = .06, p = .005) in childhood. These findings suggest that individual differences in mean fixation duration in infancy are linked to attentional and behavioral control in childhood

Individual differences in dealing with classroom noise disturbances

Classrooms are noisy: when children are engaged in solo work, they also hear background babble, noise from outdoor, people moving around. Few studies investigating the effects of noise on academic tasks use naturalistic stimuli. Questions also remain regarding why some children are more impaired by noise than others. This study compared primary school children’s performance at three academic tasks (text recall, reading comprehension, mathematics) in silence, and while hearing irrelevant verbal noise (storytelling, n =33) or mixed noise (outdoor noise, movement, babble, n =31). We found that noise does not impair overall performance. Children might use compensatory strategies (e.g. re-reading) to reach the same level of performance in silence and noise. Individual differences in selective attention and working memory were not related to the impact of noise, with one exception: children with lower working memory were more impaired by noise when doing mathematics. Replication on a larger sample is needed

Incidental category learning and cognitive load in a multisensory environment across childhood

Broadbent, H.J., Osborne, T., Rea, M., Peng, A., Mareschal, D., and Kirkham, N.Z. Multisensory information has been shown to facilitate learning (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000; Broadbent, White, Mareschal, & Kirkham, 2017; Jordan & Baker, 2011; Shams & Seitz, 2008). However, although research has examined the modulating effect of unisensory and multisensory distractors on multisensory processing, the extent to which a concurrent unisensory or multisensory cognitive load task would interfere with or support multisensory learning remains unclear. This study examined the role of concurrent task modality on incidental category learning in 6- to 10-year-olds. Participants were engaged in a multisensory learning task whilst also performing either a unisensory (visual or auditory only) or multisensory (audiovisual) concurrent task (CT). We found that engaging in an auditory CT led to poorer performance on incidental category learning compared with an audiovisual or visual CT, across groups. In 6-year-olds, category test performance was at chance in the auditory-only CT condition, suggesting auditory concurrent tasks may interfere with learning in younger children, but the addition of visual information may serve to focus attention. These findings provide novel insight into the use of multisensory concurrent information on incidental learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development and developmental changes in modality dominance and ability to switch flexibly across modalities are discussed. Keywords: Multisensory Integration; Cognitive Development; Incidental Learning; Cognitive Loa

The emergence of object-based visual attention in infancy: a role for family socioeconomic status and competing visual features

The development of spatial visual attention has been extensively studied in infants, but far less is known about the emergence of object-based visual attention. We tested 3-5- and 9-12-month-old infants on a task that allowed us to measure infants’ attention orienting bias towards whole objects when they competed with color, motion, and orientation feature information. Infants’ attention orienting to whole objects was affected by the dimension of the competing visual feature. Whether attention was biased towards the whole object or its salient competing feature (e.g. “ball” or “red”) changed with age for the color feature, with infants biased towards whole objects with age. Moreover, family socioeconomic status predicted feature-based attention in the youngest infants and object-based attention in the older infants when color feature information competed with whole object information

Do cues from multiple modalities support quicker learning in primary school children?

The current study investigates whether informative, mutually redundant audiovisual cues supports better performance in a category learning paradigm. Research suggests that, under some conditions, redundant multisensory cues supports better learning, when compared with unisensory cues. This was examined systematically across two experiments. In Experiment 1, children aged 5-, 7- and 10- years were allocated to one of the three ‘modality’ conditions (audio informative only, visual informative only, and audiovisual informative) and explicitly instructed to learn the category membership of individual exemplars, as determined by a threshold of correct responses. Unisensory or redundant multisensory cues determined category membership, depending on the learning condition. In addition to significant main effects of age group and condition, a significant interaction between age and sensory condition was found, with five-year-olds performing better when presented with redundant multisensory cues compared to unisensory cues. 10-year-olds performed better with auditory informative only cues, compared to visual informative only cues, or informative but redundant multisensory cues, with no significant difference between the latter two. In Experiment 2, the multisensory condition was presented to separate groups of 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds, examining explicit learning outcomes in the audiovisual informative condition. Results showed that children who reached threshold during training were faster, made fewer errors, and performed better during test trials. Learning appeared to be based on the visual informative cues. Findings are discussed in the context of age-related selective attention, suggesting that the value of providing multisensory informative cues to support real-world learning depends on age and instructional context

Should online maths learning environments be tailored to individuals’ cognitive profiles?

Online learning environments are well-suited for tailoring the learning experience of children individually, and on a large scale. An environment such as Math Garden allows children to practise exercises adapted to their specific mathematical ability; this is thought to maximise their mathematical skills. In the current experiment we investigated whether learning environments should also consider the differential impact of cognitive load on children’s maths’ performance, depending on their individual verbal working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC) capacity. Thirty nine children (8-11 years old) performed a multiple-choice computerised arithmetic game; participants were randomly assigned to two conditions where the visibility of time pressure, a key feature in most gamified learning environments, was manipulated. Results showed that verbal WM was positively associated with arithmetical performance in general, but that higher IC only predicted better performance when the time pressure was not visible. This effect was mostly driven by the younger children. Exploratory analyses of eye-tracking data (N = 36) showed that when time pressure was visible children attended more often to the question (e.g. 6 x 8). In addition, when time pressure was visible, children with lower IC, in particular younger children, attended more often to answer options representing operant confusion (e.g. 9 x 4 = 13) and visited more answer options before responding. These findings suggest that tailoring the visibility of time pressure, based on a child’s individual cognitive profile, could improve arithmetic performance, and may in turn improve learning in online learning environments

Infants rely more on gaze cues from own-race than other-race adults for learning under uncertainty

Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own- over other-race faces, but whether this experience has down-stream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7-month-olds (Range = 5.9-8.5 months, N = 96) use gaze from own- versus other-race adults to anticipate events. When gaze predicted an event’s occurrence with 100% reliability, 7-month-olds followed both adults equally; with 25% (chance) reliability, neither was followed. However, with 50% (uncertain) reliability, infants followed own- over other-race gaze. Differential face race experience may thus affect how infants use social cues from own- versus other-race adults for learning. Such findings suggest that infants integrate online statistical reliability information with prior knowledge of own- versus other-race to guide social interaction and learning