The socialization of visual attention: Training effects of verbal attention guidance in urban German children.

Abstract

Verbal attention guidance is assumed to be an important cultural tool contributing to the development of culture-specific visual attention styles in childhood. We used a training approach to test whether verbal attention guidance in a 10 day app-based training that accentuates either analytic or holistic processing has the power to produce enduring effects on 6- to 7-year-old urban German children’s (N = 42, 22 female, 20 male) attention in a picture description task, a single-choice recognition task and a change blindness task. Results indicate that verbal attention guidance is effective in influencing children’s attention styles across indicators. These findings provide convergent evidence for the assumption that verbal attention guidance plays a central role in the long-term socialization of attention styles.