Attentional orienting involves two neuroanatomically and functionally separate components, the reflexive and voluntary attentional sub-systems, which interact to orient attention on the environment. Three experiments, in which a cueing paradigm was used, examined reflexive and voluntary orienting over later childhood development (i.e., 8--14 years old) in order to explore the mechanisms underlying the development of the control of attentional orienting. Experiments 1 and 2 explored whether reflexive and voluntary orienting develop in parallel, and examined the influence of cue predictability on attentional orienting during development. Experiment 3 explored the role of explicit instructions in the influence of cue predictability on voluntary and reflexive orienting. The results indicate that the development of attentional orienting over later childhood is a reflection of the operation of an underlying mechanism, general developmental changes in speed of processing. Apart from this mechanism, the efficiency of attentional orienting remains the same across age. In addition, the influence of cue predictability on attentional orienting reflects the operation of a low-level mechanism which operates independently of strategic influences; this mechanism may be covariance detection and judgment. The implications of these conclusions for modeling attentional orienting, and the development thereof, are considered.

Metacognition is the monitoring, evaluating, and correction of one's own performance while engaged in an intellectual task. It has been explored within educational psychology in various cognitive and academic domains, for example, general problem solving, physics, reading, writing, and mathematics, and with different populations including children who are gifted, children who have learning disabilities, as well as children who have intellectual delays. Research in these areas has demonstrated that the use of metacognition differs with different levels of ability. Metacognition has rarely been mentioned in the psychomotor literature. It is not known whether children of different psychomotor abilities use metacognition differently. This study used a think-aloud protocol to compare the active use of metacognition in children with different psychomotor abilities---high skill (N = 8), average (N = 9), developmental coordination disorder (DCD) (N = 5)---during a novel motor task. Children with DCD did not verbalize fewer or different metacognitive concepts than either the average or high skill children, however, relative to their counterparts, a significant proportion of the concepts verbalized by children with DCD were found to be inappropriate or inaccurate. These findings reflect ineffective metacognitive processing by children with DCD during a psychomotor task. In general, the results of this study parallel those found in the cognitive domain. This study showed that children with differing psychomotor abilities also demonstrated differences in use of metacognition.

The Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence (FTII; Fagan, 1987), the Early Social Communication Scale (ESCS; Seibert et al., 1982) and the Test of Orienting Preferences (TOP), an attention task designed for this study, were used to examine social versus nonsocial attention in children with autism and developmental disorders (n = 18). The Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS; Schopler, Reichler, & Renner, 1986) was used as a continuous diagnostic measure in order to correlate performance on the measures with the severity of autism. On the FTII, as autistic symptomatology increased, the percent of time a child oriented to novel stimuli in both immediate and delayed conditions also increased. On the ESCS, as autistic symptomatology increased, joint attention behaviors decreased. Comparing the ESCS and the FTII indicated that as joint attention behaviors decreased, selective attention to novelty increased. With respect to the new attention measure, children with typical development oriented more than 85% of the time to all stimuli, whereas children with more features of autism oriented less frequently to social and auditory stimuli, and were slower to orient to auditory stimuli. The findings represent preliminary behavioral evidence for a social attention deficit in children with autism. The implications for these findings are discussed.

Children with and without autism were evaluated on two change detection tasks that entailed responding to 2 side-by-side images that were displayed on a computer screen. In Experiment 1, a distracter object that remained unchanged was displayed next to a target object that changed in 1 of 3 ways, a global position change, a color change, or a local deletion change. The stimuli consisted of photographs and drawings that were presented at blank intervals of either 50 or 250 ms. In Experiment 2, color and deletion changes were compared in photographs of objects and people. Children with autism were expected to demonstrate enhanced change detection across both experiments, as well as better detection of local than global changes, and superior processing of changes to objects compared to people. Across tasks, both groups performed comparably in change detection ability. Children with autism did not demonstrate enhanced visual detection, and evidenced similar patterns of visual discrimination compared to typically developing children. They also exhibited similar processing of changes to objects and people. Age was positively associated with improvements in change detection among both groups of children.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-135).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1988. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [120]-126.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Keith Oatley.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Philip Zelazo.

Thesis (Dip.App.Psych.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 1978.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Murdoch University, 2001. / Thesis submitted to the Division of Social Sciences, Humanities and Education. Bibliography: leaves 437-526.