Development of Attention in Preschool Children

孩子们是在一个充斥着人们说话的面孔和伴随的声音的世界中成长的。为了避免混淆，并与任何特定的人进行适当的交流，儿童必须能够感知地区分多个说话的面孔和声音。要做到这一点，他们必须识别和选择相应的面孔-声音对，然后将它们绑定成统一的、完整的视听实体。选择性/持续注意在知觉分离过程中起着关键作用，因为它帮助我们在将其绑定之前识别和选择相应的面孔和声音。本项目研究了4、5、6岁儿童对社会相关视听信息选择性/持续性注意力的发展及其对感知、学习和记忆的影响。这个项目的结果将对正常发育的幼儿的感知、注意力、学习和记忆提供重要的见解，并将提出新的方法，以最大限度地提高他们获得关键的认知技能，这对随后在学校和以后的成功至关重要。此外，研究结果将为一些学习障碍的根本原因提供新的见解，这些障碍已知涉及听觉和视觉信息的注意力和结合受损，并将为发现此类残疾和改善受影响儿童的认知和社会发展提供循证方法。选择性/持续性注意在婴儿期和幼儿期逐渐出现，它是感知、学习、记忆和社会反应的关键门户。本项目研究4、5、6岁儿童在感知隔离中对说话面孔及其伴随声音的选择性/持续关注的发展。该项目试图回答三个主要问题。首先，幼儿依靠选择性/持续注意力识别和结合视听相关信息的能力有多好，这些信息通常是在他们典型的混乱的多感官环境中获得的，这种能力是否随着发展而提高？第二，是什么潜在的知觉机制使选择性/持续注意多感觉信息的发育改善成为可能？第三，特定的早期经历（例如，接触多种语言或不同种族的面孔）如何影响选择性/持续注意力的发展？为了研究选择性/持续注意力，我们将依靠眼动追踪来测量儿童在执行各种实验任务时的眼睛注视，这些实验任务需要他们感知地搜索混乱的视听场景，进行视听转移，锻炼他们的执行控制技能，以及学习和记忆特定的视听综合事件。该项目的研究结果将为儿童早期注意力和学习的出现提供新的见解，提出基于经验的方法来最大限度地提高正常发育儿童的注意力和学习能力，并将为提高早期学习障碍风险儿童的注意力和学习能力提供一种基于证据的方法。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Children develop in a world cluttered with people’s talking faces and accompanying voices. To avoid confusion, and to communicate properly with any particular person, children must be able to perceptually segregate multiple talking faces and voices. To do so, they must identify and select corresponding face-voice pairs and then bind them into unitary and integrated audiovisual entities. Selective/sustained attention plays a critical role in the perceptual segregation process because it helps us identify and select corresponding faces and voices prior to binding them. This project investigates the development of selective/sustained attention to socially relevant audiovisual information and its impact on perception, learning, and memory in typically developing 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children. The results from this project will provide critical insights into perception, attention, learning, and memory in typically developing young children and will suggest new ways to maximize their acquisition of critical cognitive skills essential for subsequent success in school and beyond. In addition, the results will provide new insights into the root causes of some learning disabilities that are known to involve impaired attention to and binding of auditory and visual information and will provide an evidence-based approach for detecting such disabilities and improving affected children’s cognitive and social development.Selective/sustained attention emerges gradually during infancy and early childhood and it is the critical gateway to perception, learning, memory, and social responsiveness. This project investigates the development of selective/sustained attention in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children to talking faces and their accompanying voices in the service of perceptual segregation. The project seeks to answer three principal questions. First, how well do young children rely on selective/sustained attention to identify and bind audiovisually related information normally available in their typically cluttered multisensory environment and does this ability improve with development? Second, what underlying perceptual mechanisms make the developmental improvement in selective/sustained attention to multisensory information possible? Third, how does specific early experience (e.g., exposure to multiple languages or to different-race faces) affect the growth of selective/sustained attention? To investigate selective/sustained attention, we will rely on eye tracking to measure eye gaze while children perform various experimental tasks that require them to perceptually search a cluttered audiovisual scene, to perform audio-visual transfer, to exercise their executive control skills, and to learn and remember specific audiovisually integrated events. The findings from this project will provide novel insights into the emergence of attention and learning in early childhood, suggest empirically-based ways to maximize attention and learning in typically developing children, and will provide an evidence-based method for improving attention and learning in children at risk for early learning disabilities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.