The Changing Face of Attentional Development

Abstract

It is customary to begin a review of attention with an apology for the lack of a clear definition and a nod to William James (1890) for nevertheless encouraging researchers to study it. A practical consequence of this definitional uncertainty has been that the study of attention and its development has been dominated by a handful of tentative operational definitions, called attentional tasks or paradigms. While these paradigms have generated a large amount of research, they have so far failed to produce a sophisticated understanding of age-related changes in attention. Here, we describe an ongoing paradigm shift in the field of attentional development that is occurring in response to this stalemate (Fig. 1). By tracing the recent changes in research practice and connecting them to underlying theoretical ideas, we outline a new conceptualization of attentional development. Developmental changes in attention are now studied as both a cause and an outcome of the dynamic interactions among the environment, the developing brain, and an individual. The Way We WereCognitive science during the second half of the 20th century was dominated by the metaphor of the mind as a computer. Within this view, attention was seen as the mental gatekeeper, as illustrated in Figure 1a, with its primary function being to manage and select a subset of available sensory information for the control of action. An important corollary of the gatekeeper model is the situational invariance assumption. This means that attention operates as an encapsulated module or a functional unit in a similar fashion across different individuals and situations (e.g., Posner, 1978). Following this idea, by adapting the chronometric tasks first developed for testing adults, attentional development researchers started to measure age-related changes in basic attentional functions. This approach promised to detect the onset of attentional abilities in childhood, to record changes in those abilities with maturation, and to document deviations from normative development in atypically developing populations. Figure 2 illustrates and summarizes seven widely used laboratory paradigms of attention.A large body of evidence documenting developmental changes in attentional function has emerged from work using these popular tests (e.g., see Rueda, 2013, for a recent review). However, when we recently evaluated this literature (Ristic & Enns, in press), we noted that the large volume of data generated by the fine-grained laboratory tasks was not matched by a similar refinement in AbstractThe field of attentional development has recently undergone a quiet revolution. Attention is no longer being studied as a static gatekeeper of consciousness and action; instead, it is being reconceptualized as a dynamic system that both influences and is influenced by the interactions between individuals and their environments. In this review, we first revisit the conventional understanding of attentional development, showing that a large body of research conducted using a handful of labor...

How attention gates social interactions

“…This is consistent with the hypothesis presented here that attentional responses to environmental social affordances are modulated by both social perception and the perceived relevance of available social information. A similar dynamic framework has been advanced by Ristic and Enns, who, based on a review of developmental data, argued that the classic concept of attention as a static gating mechanism does not capture the new findings showing attention as dynamic ability that both influences and is influenced by the interactions between cues, contexts, persons, and their behaviors . The present conceptualization extends these general principles to the realm of social attention by identifying the processes that enable such interplay within this specific functional domain and in turn facilitate dynamic social interactive behaviors such as reciprocal and shared attention.…”

Development of the ability to combine visual and acoustic information in working memory

“…Traditionally, a distinction has been made between types of attention that are exogenous, or controlled by external stimuli, versus endogenous, or controlled by the mind. The latter type of attention is the type that develops across the elementary school years according to many different procedures (for a review see Ristic & Enns, ). Closely related work discusses the development of executive function ( Davidson, Amso, Cruess Anderson, & Diamond, ).…”

How I Attend—Not How Well Do I Attend: Rethinking Developmental Frameworks of Attention and Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development

“…Ironically, the defect model is also the de-facto style of discourse on cognition in typical development with the same primary questions of what a child can or cannot do or what abilities they have or do not have at a specific age in relation to older children or to an ultimate standard of adult functioning. Consistent with contemporary perspectives on the development of attention (Ristic & Enns, 2015a, 2015b, we argue that conceptualizations of ability and disability and strengths and deficits among both children with ASD and TD children are more usefully framed as transactional and dynamic. Within this framework, we contend that the emergence and development of attentional and cognitive styles are associated with factors such as personal bias, relevance, motivation, and previous experience, which impact on and are impacted by the individual's functioning in the real world.…”

“…This rethinking of the development of attention and the relevant research questions and paradigms are consistent with the emerging emphasis in the field on the dynamic interactions between the developing individual, their developing brain, and the environment (Ristic & Enns, 2015a, 2015b. Rather than a focus on the abilities per se and how well they function, the more meaningful question is how they function within the context of the environment in relation to the individual's developmental status-as different environments and even different aspects of the same environment are relevant or salient to children at different ages, or from different backgrounds, or with different interests.…”

“…at a particular age or stage of development, relative to the maturational pinnacle of performance in adulthood. Accordingly and not surprisingly, empirical accounts of attention inevitably reflect improvements in attentional abilities with age (Ristic & Enns, 2015b). Based on their extensive review of the developmental literature on attention, Ristic and Enns (2015a) argued that decades of developmental attention research across multiple paradigms have led to a simple unsatisfying conclusion-that voluntary control over attention improves during childhood.…”