Attentional fluctuations in preschoolers: Direct and indirect relations with task accuracy, academic readiness, and school performance

Abstract

Attentional control fluctuates in the presence of internal and external distractors, wandering on and off a given task. The current study investigated individual differences in attentional fluctuations in 250 preschoolers. Attentional fluctuations were assessed via intra-individual variability in response time in a Go/No-Go task. Greater fluctuations in attentional control were linked to lower task accuracy. In addition, greater attentional fluctuations predicted lower performance in a task of cognitive flexibility, the Dimensional Change Card Sort task. Attentional fluctuations were also associated with laboratory measures of academic readiness in preschool, as assessed by the Applied Problems and Letter-Word Identification subscales of the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement, which in turn predicted teacher reports of academic performance in first grade. Attentional fluctuations also had indirect associations with emergent math skills in preschool, via cognitive flexibility, as well as indirect associations with first-grade teacher reports of academic performance, via the relations between cognitive flexibility and emergent math skills in preschool. These results suggest that consistency is an important aspect of attentional control during early childhood.

Attentional Fluctuations, Cognitive Flexibility, and Bilingualism in Kindergarteners

“…The present study is a step in this direction, extending prior work by investigating if there is a relationship between bilingualism and a specific aspect of cognition: attentional fluctuations. Attentional fluctuations represent consistency in attentional control, predicting cognitive task performance in adults and in clinical populations [11,12]. However, the role of attentional fluctuations in children, and especially in bilingual children, is less clear.…”

“…However, to date, research on attentional fluctuations in children—and especially bilingual children—is limited. One study on monolingual preschoolers showed that attentional fluctuations significantly predicted performance on that task (a go/no-go task), on a separate cognitive control task, and on laboratory measures of academic readiness [11]. Furthermore, cognitive flexibility mediated the association between attentional fluctuations and academic measures.…”

“…If one subscribes to the theory behind the bilingual advantage—that simultaneously managing two language representations enhances general attentional control—one would expect bilinguals to have lower attentional fluctuations. Given that attentional fluctuations have been found to contribute directly to measures of cognitive control [11], one might even hypothesize that bilingualism can relate to measures of cognitive control indirectly via attentional fluctuations. In other words, it is possible that attentional fluctuations could mediate or moderate between bilingualism and cognitive control.…”

Intra-individual variability in task performance after cognitive training is associated with long-term outcomes in children

“…Intraindividual response time variability metrics are sensitive and reliable measures of individual differences in attention control processes 34,35 . They are often used as an index of an individual's attention allocation efficiency or degree of fluctuation in attention control during task performance 43,44,[74][75][76] . Intra-individual variability has been linked with cognitive control measures in healthy children and adults, and the variability in response times measured in one task is correlated with working and long-term memory or intelligence measured in separate tasks 28,41,43,44,[77][78][79] .…”

“…Intra-individual variability is associated with the integrity of brain structure and function, most strongly in frontal brain regions, as well as with dopaminergic neuromodulation see 34 for a review, 38,[40][41][42][43][44] . Furthermore, intra-individual variability measures are closely associated with the inhibitory and cognitive control abilities mediated by frontal and subcortical dopaminergic brain systems in healthy children and adults 28,42,[45][46][47] . In summary, there is sufficient reason to hypothesize that intra-individual response time variability metrics can detect short-term training effects and may be useful in predicting the degree of long-term benefits.…”