The Development of Attention in Children1

Educational Testing ServiceThe ability to attend selectively to critical stimulus features and" ignore others is an integral part of the learning process, and it is necessary to understand the development of this ability in order to establish an adequate model of children's learning and thinking.We have examined the development of selective attention through research on children's incidental learning--that is, the acquisition of information that is extraneous or irrelevant to task performance.The original research paradigm was derived from Broadbent's (1958) model which states that a filtering mechanism causes certain information in a subject's environment to be attended to while other information is ignored.The former is held in memory briefly before being passed through filters for further processing, while the latter does not pass through the filters and fades from memory.More recent analyses by Neisser (1967), Treisman (1969), and others have expanded upon Broadbent's relatively simple filtering concept, but the essential aspect of the model, the principle of attention to selected stimulus features at the expense of others, remains useful.We have employed a paradigm in which certain features of the stimulus are designated as relevant for task performance and others are defined as incidental.Performance on this central task is assessed as well as later recall of information about the incidental stimuli, and these two measures together provide a basis for inferring selective attention.High incidental learning is assumed to reflect a high degree of attention to incidental cues; 23338504,