Development of Attention in Preschool Children

孩子们在一个充斥着人们说话的面孔和伴随的声音的世界里成长。为了避免混淆，并与任何特定的人进行适当的沟通，儿童必须能够在感知上分离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，然后将它们绑定成单一和综合的视听实体。选择性/持续性注意在感知隔离过程中起着关键作用，因为它帮助我们在绑定之前识别和选择相应的面孔和声音。该项目调查了选择性/持续关注社会相关视听信息的发展及其对典型发展中的4岁，5岁和6岁儿童的感知，学习和记忆的影响。该项目的结果将为典型发育中的幼儿提供对感知，注意力，学习和记忆的重要见解，并将提出新的方法，以最大限度地提高他们获得关键认知技能的能力，这些技能对随后在学校及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，这些学习障碍涉及对听觉和视觉信息的注意力受损和结合，并将为检测此类障碍和改善受影响儿童的认知和社会发展提供基于证据的方法。选择性/持续性注意力在婴儿期和幼儿期逐渐出现，它是感知的关键门户，学习记忆和社会反应能力本研究旨在探讨4、5、6岁儿童对说话面孔及其伴随的声音的选择性/持续性注意力的发展。该项目试图回答三个主要问题。第一，幼儿如何依靠选择性/持续性注意力来识别和结合通常在其典型的杂乱的多感官环境中可用的视听相关信息，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得对多感官信息的选择性/持续性注意的发展性改善成为可能？第三，具体的早期经验（例如，接触多种语言或不同种族的面孔）是否会影响选择性/持续性注意力的增长？为了研究选择性/持续性注意，我们将依靠眼动追踪来测量眼睛注视，而儿童执行各种实验任务，要求他们感知搜索一个混乱的视听场景，执行视听转移，锻炼他们的执行控制技能，并学习和记住特定的视听整合事件。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，提出基于实验的方法，以最大限度地提高典型发育儿童的注意力和学习能力，并将提供证据该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得通过评估使用的支持，基金会的学术价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

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.