Because children are bombarded by an abundance of information from the environment, the development of the ability to filter extraneous information in order to attend to the most relevant information is crucial for optimal information processing. The ability to effectively filter affects every aspect of children's functioning, including educational activities and social interactions. In order to assess the development of filtering with ecologically relevant factors, a forced-choice filtering paradigm in which the target and distracting stimuli were presented at different times was used to measure the speed of target identification among a group of 6-year-olds (n=10), 7-year-olds (n=12), 9-year-olds (n=13) and adults (n=13). The targets were presented at the centre of a computer screen with flankers presented to their left and right along the same horizontal plane. The flankers varied with regard to proximity to the target and were presented 200 ms or 400 ms before, at the same time as, or 200 or 400 ms after the presentation of the target. The distance between the distractors and target was also varied to assess the ability of participants to optimally narrow their focus of attention. Temporal differences in the onset of the target and distractors were used to assess issues of attentional control in a real-world context, where attention must be maintained within a changing environment. Though no difference in response time was observed for the presentation of close and far flankers, the display of flankers before the targets led to faster response times in all four groups while the display of flankers after the target led to slower response times in the two youngest groups. The results are consistent with the notion that children are less efficient in their ability to filter attention compared to adults. Findings are discussed in relation to developmental changes from age 6 years to adulthood.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.99585 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Dawkins, Tamara. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.) |
| Rights | © Tamara Dawkins, 2007 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002600464, proquestno: AAIMR32513, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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