The effects of distraction on 5‐ and 8‐year‐old children's performance on a short‐term memory task were examined. Tasks at three levels of difficulty were employed to determine whether a floor effect could account for the lack of an age difference reported in an earlier study. A floor effect does not appear to be a key factor; performance was well above chance under all conditions here, yet the absolute amount of performance decrement was roughly equal for the two age levels regardless of task difficulty. Also at issue here is whether proportional change might be a more appropriate index of distraction effects than absolute performance decrement. The relevance of the present data to this issue is discussed. The children adapted somewhat to the presence of distraction as shown in greater per‐formance impairment for the first trial under distraction than for remaining trials. The degree of adaptation was roughly comparable for the two age groups.

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Children 5, 8 to 9, and 12 years of age were given a component-selection task with instructions to attend to one component or another, or with no specific instructions regarding the stimuli. Children at all age levels varied their attention to the nondominant component (color) in accord with instructions. To this extent then, children even as young as age 5 are capable of altering their manner of attention deployment. In another respect, however, the data suggested a developmental change in the way children respond to varying task demands: The children of age 8 and beyond, but not the 5-year-olds, reduced their attention to the dominant component (shape) in response to instructions to concentrate on the nondominant component. During the early school years, children apparently develop a tendency to employ "attentional trading," withdrawing attention from a normally dominant stimulus component when it becomes advantageous to increase attention to another feature. The results are discussed as calling for modification of earlier hypotheses concerning development of attention.Objects in the world differ in several components or features, such as shape, color, size, and so forth; yet individuals may attend to only a selected portion of the available information when discriminating among them (e. g., Gibson, 1969). The information a person uses to distinguish a stimulus object from others in a learning task is often called a "functional stimulus," in that the person attends to such information for the purpose of identifying the stimulus and associating it with a response. In recent studies, we have

The effects of instructions on children's component selection were examined in three experiments. In Experiment 1, 5‐ and 8‐year‐old children were given: (a) instructions to attend to the dominant stimulus component (shape), (b) instructions to attend to the nondominant or secondary feature (color), or (c) no instructions regarding the components of the stimuli. Both age groups showed an ability to vary their attention to the secondary feature in accord with the instructions. However, the 8‐year‐olds showed greater flexibility in that they employed a type of attentional trading–withdrawing attention from the dominant shape component in exchange for increased attention to color. Experiment 2 replicated conditions (b) and (c) above with 5‐, 9‐ and 12‐year‐olds and also included a condition requiring attention to both stimulus components. Again, only children beyond age 5 tended to withdraw attention from the dominant shape component as they increased attention to color. Instructions to attend to both features proved relatively unsuccessful with 5‐ and 9‐year‐olds and were accommodated with only moderate success by 12‐year‐olds. In Experiment 3 the latter instructions, applied to stimuli with spatially separated components, were accommodated quite successfully by 9‐year‐olds, although not by 6‐year‐olds. Active attention to two components is apparently within the capabilities of 9‐year‐old children when the components are spatially separated and can readily be viewed as independent entities. However, purposeful attention to two integrated features is believed to require additional analytic abilities which do not develop until a later age.