Perceptual biases during cued task switching relate to decision process differences between children and adults.

Abstract

Previous work suggests that children engage preparatory processing differently than adults in cued task switching. One potential consequence is that they are differentially biased by visual properties of the stimuli, for example, target-choice similarity. We tested this possibility in 215 children and young adults ranging from 6 to 27 years of age. Participants played a cue-target game with varying levels of working memory and attentional demand where they matched multidimensional stimuli according to a cued dimension. Younger age, low working memory demand, and matching fine grained dimensions (i.e., pattern) increased the bias of target-choice similarity on task performance. Older age, high working memory, and matching global dimensions (i.e., shape) mitigated the bias. Developmental transitions to adult performance differed by task demands but generally occurred during adolescence. A drift diffusion analysis revealed age and task differences in decision making strategies consistent with how similarity impacted task performance, indicating that, especially with low working memory demand, children made impulsive, similarity-driven decisions. Our findings support the idea that children engage in preparation strategies that exacerbate perceptual biases on task performance; improvements are observed with age or through changes in task structure and stimuli. These results have implications for interpreting cognitive control performance in children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

A Developmental Eye Tracking Investigation of Cued Task Switching Performance

“…The 14-to 16-year-old group was not significantly different from adults in their accuracy across the first five levels and in their response times across all six levels. This result was largely consistent with what has been found behaviorally with versions of this task-that adult-like performance is seen around age 14 years (Bauer et al, 2017;Martinez et al, 2018). It is intriguing to speculate, however, that ages 11-13 years may be in a transitional period where fixation patterns begin to change prior to behavioral performance; 11-to 13year-olds for some task levels (e.g., Level 2 during the cue period) had equivalent fixation times to adults.…”

“…Fifty-four adults, ages 18-29 years, and 63 children, ages 6-16 years, were initially recruited for this study. Previous studies (Bauer et al, 2017;Martinez et al, 2018) utilizing a similar cued taskswitching paradigm found reasonable effects at a similar sample size, motivating the sample size for this study. The age range for analysis was narrowed for adults to 18-27 years to overcome limited sampling in ages 28-29 years, and for children to 8-16 years to have complete neuropsychological assessments.…”

“…There were four primary goals for this experiment: (a) To test if children's eye fixations differed from those of adults during the anticipatory cue and delay periods; (b) To identify at what age children's eye movements became similar to adults' to see if this aligned with or preceded previously published behavioral results of ages 13-14 years for this task (Bauer et al, 2017;Martinez et al, 2018); and (c) To see if eye movements held relevance for the behavioral response recorded at the end of the trial by examining relationships between eye movements and task accuracy and response times. We predicted that: (a) Children's eye fixations would differ from adult eye fixations, particularly in viewing response choices; (b) Eye movement maturity would occur at the same age as we see behavioral improvement, reflecting more mature attention patterns; and (c) More mature eye patterns would correlate with better behavioral performance in task accuracy and response time above and beyond age.…”

“…However, young children do appear to have the capacity to use proactive control in some circumstances as early as ages 3-5 years (Brace, Morton, & Munakata, 2006;Chevalier et al, 2015;Diamond, Carlson, & Beck, 2005). Despite evidence of some use of proactive control abilities by middle childhood, performance gaps between children and adults in cued task switching persist into mid-adolescence, even with experimental manipulations in cue type (lexical or symbolic), amount of working memory demand, and number of cued features (Bauer et al, 2017;Martinez, Mack, Bauer, Roe, & Church, 2018).…”

Auditory and visual category learning in children and adults.

“…Prior work has generally demonstrated that children have more cautious responses than adults (Manning et al, 2021; Nordmeyer et al, 2016; Ratcliff et al, 2012; Schneider & Frank, 2016), though in some tasks children make more impulsive, less cautious decisions than adults (Martinez et al, 2018). Here, we found that, in general, children had less cautious responses than adults and that children had more similar decision thresholds for correct and incorrect responses.…”