title: Computerized games to study the development of attention in childhood.
abstract: Children enjoy playing games. We can take advantage of this in the designs of computerized tasks that will engage their interest. These designs also serve to advance the study of chronometric measures, such as manual and saccadic reaction times and event related potentials, with young children. The goals of our method development are (1) to allow for comparable tasks across a wide variety of ages, (2) to make possible comparisons of child performance with data gathered in adult cognitive studies, and (3) to help to support inferences about the development of underlying mechanisms. We have designed a battery of computerized tasks in order to study the development of attention functions of alertness, orienting, and executive control during childhood. Our purpose is to describe each of these tasks in detail and present the results that have been obtained so far. The battery was tested using a sample of 5-year-old children as subjects.
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Science Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. andrea@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Berger
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: M K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Rothbart
authors.forename: M I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Posner
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003201:Computers; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009922:Oregon; D010988:Play and Playthings; D011930:Reaction Time; D012107:Research Design