Neither sharpened nor lost: the unique role of attention in children’s neural representations

Abstract

One critical feature of children′s cognition is their relatively immature attention. Decades of research have shown that children′s attentional abilities mature slowly over the course of development, including the ability to filter out distracting information. Despite such rich behavioral literature, little is known about how developing attentional abilities modulate neural representations in children. This information is critical to understanding exactly how attentional development shapes the way children process information. One intriguing possibility is that attention might be less likely to impact neural representations in children as compared with adults. In particular, representations of attended items may be less likely to be sharpened relative to unattended items in children as compared to adults. To investigate this possibility, we measured brain activity using fMRI while adults (21-31 years) and children (7-9 years) performed a one-back working memory task in which they were directed to attend to either motion direction or an object in a complex display where both were present. We used multivoxel pattern analysis and compared decoding accuracy of attended and unattended information. Consistent with attentional sharpening, we found higher decoding accuracy for task-relevant information (i.e., objects in the object-attended condition) than for task-irrelevant information (i.e., motion in the object-attended condition) in adults– visual cortices. However, in children′s visual cortices, both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information were decoded equally well. What′s more, exploratory whole-brain analysis showed that the children represent task–irrelevant information more than adults in multiple regions across the brain, including the prefrontal cortex. These findings show that 1) attention does not sharpen neural representations in the child visual cortex, and further 2) that the developing brain can represent more information than the adult brain.

Children extract a new linguistic rule more quickly than adults

“…Adults showed a clear advantage in classifying phrases according to the instructed rule (as demonstrated by their overall better accuracy as well as faster reaction times), while children become sensitive to the hidden, uninstructed rule more quickly. This age‐related dissociation closely resembles a number of related findings showing that children process and learn task‐irrelevant information better than adults (e.g., Blanco & Sloutsky, 2019; Decker et al., 2015; Jung et al., 2023; Plebanek & Sloutsky, 2017). In one study, young children (ages 4–5) and adults were asked to perform a visual search task in which stimuli had a task‐relevant dimension and task‐irrelevant dimensions, and then tested on their memory for these stimuli.…”

“…Adults showed a stronger bias towards selecting the stimulus with the false instruction, while adolescents (13–17 years) and children (6–12 years) more quickly abandoned this incorrect information as they learned the true probabilities through experience (Decker et al., 2015). Recent fMRI evidence underscores these results, showing that children (7–9 years) represent both task‐relevant and task‐irrelevant information in visual cortex to a similar extent, unlike adults who prioritize task relevant information much more strongly (Jung et al., 2023). Taken together, these results suggest that adults may be at times “hyper‐focused” on the task at the hand, at the cost of processing information that is external to their assigned task.…”

“…Parallel findings outside the domain of language also suggest that, relative to adults, children's poorer selective attention leads them to more deeply process and learn about task‐extraneous information (Blanco & Sloutsky, 2019; Decker et al., 2015; Jung et al., 2023; Plebanek & Sloutsky, 2017). In turn, this may allow children to more effectively capture environmental contingencies that are not necessarily goal‐relevant, oftentimes producing more robust incidental learning.…”

Task-Switch Related Reductions in Neural Distinctiveness in Children and Adults: Commonalities and Differences

“…By demonstrating that the currently relevant task can be reliably predicted from neural activation patterns during task switching not only in adults but also in children, our results provide novel insights into children's ability to flexibly switch between rules. These findings add to an emerging research direction investigating the role of neural representations for cognitive development across childhood and adolescence (e.g., Fandakova et al, 2019;Jung et al, 2023).…”

“…Age-related differences in switch costs have been attributed to children's difficulties to inhibit the no-longer relevant task set and to update the relevant task set when rules switch (Crone et al, 2004(Crone et al, , 2006aGupta et al, 2009;Wendelken et al, 2012). Moreover, children's representations of goalrelevant task sets have been suggested to be less distinct from one another (Zelazo, 2004;Crone et al, 2006b;Lorsbach and Reimer, 2008;Jung et al, 2023), especially when task sets are partially overlapping (e.g., due to same responses; cf. Crone et al, 2006a).…”