Development of attention and distractibility in the first 4 years of life.

Ruff, Holly A.; Capozzoli, Mary

doi:10.1037/0012-1649.39.5.877

Cited by 188 publications

(185 citation statements)

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“…Both Turnure and Higgins and Turnure also found that the same distracter actually enhanced focal attention among slightly older children, resulting in enhanced performance on the pattern-recognition task. Ruff and Capozzoli (2003) reported a similar "mobilization of attention" in the presence of environmental distracters in children as young as 3.5 years of age. Turnure hypothesized that for some children under some conditions, the presentation of an environmental distraction might actually funnel children's attention to a target task, resulting in improved task performance.…”

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confidence: 62%

Temperament, distraction, and learning in toddlerhood

Dixon

Salley

Clements

2006

Infant Behavior and Development

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The word and non-word learning abilities of toddlers were tested under various conditions of environmental distraction, and evaluated with respect to children's temperamental attentional focus. Thirty-nine children and their mothers visited the lab at child age 21-months, where children were exposed to fast-mapping word learning trials and nonlinguistic sequential learning trials. It was found that both word and nonword-learning was adversely affected by the presentation of environmental distractions. But it was also found that the effect of the distractions sometimes depended on children's level of attentional focus. Specifically, children high in attentional focus were less affected by environmental distractions than children low in attentional focus when attempting to learn from a model, whereas children low in attentional focus demonstrated little learning from the model. Translationally, these results may be of use to child health-care providers investigating possible sources of cognitive and language delay. Temperament, Distraction, and Learning in ToddlerhoodThe fields of temperament and cognitive development have followed long and productive paths, even though they seem to have done so in relative isolation from one another. Temperament researchers have made strides in identifying the nature of early temperament and its potential biological underpinnings, and they have identified a host of social-emotional sequelae of early individual differences in temperament (e.g., Guerin, Gottfried, Oliver, & Thomas, 2003;Molfese & Molfese, 2000). Cognitive development researchers have also made significant strides toward understanding basic mechanisms underlying attention (e.g., Colombo, 2004;Richards, 2004;Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2004;Ruff & Rothbart, 1996) and memory (e.g., Bauer, 2004;Hayne, 2004), among other cognitive domains. Unfortunately, few researchers have undertaken empirical efforts to document interrelations between temperament and basic cognition (e.g., Wolfe & Bell, 2004); although Fagen and colleagues have amply demonstrated that aspects of temperamental fussiness (i.e., affective distress) negatively impact children's performance on cognitive tasks (Fagen, Ohr, Fleckenstein, & Ribner, 1985;Fagen, Ohr, Singer, & Fleckenstein, 1987;Fleckenstein & Fagen, 1994). Much would be gained were researchers able to link individual differences in cognitive function to individual differences in any of a number of domains of temperament, because such an effort would likely inform a better understanding of intra domain individual differences.To the extent that temperament-cognitive relationships have been examined, a major focus seems to have been on temperament-language relationships (specifically vocabulary, e.g., Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wallace E. Dixon, Jr., Department of Psychology, East Tennessee State University, P.O. Box 70649, Johnson City, TN,37614. E-mail: dixonw@etsu.edu.. Author Note This work was supported by a NIH/NICHD Grant HD043865 to the first au...

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confidence: 62%

Temperament, distraction, and learning in toddlerhood

Dixon

Salley

Clements

2006

Infant Behavior and Development

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“…EA is consciously effortful, focused, and less prone to distractions (Posner & Rothbart, 2007), and varies as a function of social interactions, emotional ties, and object interest. Ruff and Capozzoli's (2003) study placed EA within the context of alerting (casual attention) and orienting (settled attention: pausing in casual attention to look steadily at a toy). Focused attention (EA) was defined by concentration with intent facial expression, close visual inspection of toy, and minimal extraneous body movement.…”

Section: Developmental Regulatory Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion-focused coping in young children: Self and self-regulatory processes

Kopp

2009

New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development

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This chapter explores paths toward emotion-focused coping among typically developing young children and their more or less average parents-portraying characteristic developmental patterns, demands, and stresses. Emotion-focused coping strategies are effortful and aim to decrease negative emotions in stress-inducing interpersonal contexts. The themes here highlight developmental changes of the early years and related parent and child hassles; likely cognitive, social, and linguistic antecedents and correlates of emotion-focused coping; and some self-regulatory processes that enable coping. The chapter concludes by noting that new directions in the study of young children's coping involve returning to well-crafted, short-term longitudinal research.

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“…14 The lack of attention errors score seen was inversely proportional to age, that is, higher values attained at younger ages indicate that older children perform better and make fewer mistakes than smaller children, in agreement with the literature. 8,12,[15][16][17] Younger children have a more limited attention span, and as they grow, there are changes in their inner processing mechanisms that increase this capacity. 18 Younger individuals seem to have a more impulsive behavior than their older counterparts 11 , in accordance with the present investigation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proposta de instrumento comportamental para avaliar a atenção auditiva sustentada

Feniman

Ortelan

Lauris

et al. 2007

Rev. Bras. Otorrinolaringol.

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A atenção sustentada e vigilância são alguns dos processos que caracterizam a atenção e fundamentais para o desenvolvimento de algumas habilidades. OBJETIVO: Propor um instrumento comportamental simples, de fácil e rápida aplicação para auxiliar na avaliação da habilidade de atenção auditiva sustentada. Estudo prospectivo. MATERIAL E MÉTODO: Crianças voluntárias de 6 a 11 anos de idade, 139 do gênero feminino e 141 do masculino. O teste foi denominado Teste da Habilidade da Atenção Auditiva Sustentada e baseado no Teste de Desempenho Contínuo. Consiste na apresentação biaural e diótica, de uma lista de 100 palavras monossilábicas nas quais estão inclusas 20 vezes o monossílabo que deverá ser identificado. Esta lista é apresentada seis vezes sem interrupção. É realizado em cabina acústica, com auxílio de um CD player acoplado a um audiômetro de dois canais a 50 dBNS e tem uma duração média de 9 minutos.O resultado do teste é obtido pela pontuação total e pelo decréscimo de vigilância. RESULTADOS: A obtenção dos resultados mostrou-se fácil e rápida. Não foi encontrada significância estatística nos resultados para ambos os gêneros, porém significativa diferença foi encontrada entre as idades. CONCLUSÃO: O teste proposto não apresentou qualquer desconforto às crianças participantes e mostrou-se altamente sugestivo para avaliar a habilidade de atenção auditiva sustentada em crianças.

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Development of attention and distractibility in the first 4 years of life.

Cited by 188 publications

References 50 publications

Temperament, distraction, and learning in toddlerhood

Temperament, distraction, and learning in toddlerhood

Emotion-focused coping in young children: Self and self-regulatory processes

Proposta de instrumento comportamental para avaliar a atenção auditiva sustentada

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