The wide attentional window: a major deficit of children with attention difficulties.
The present study assessed visual selective attention in children with attention difficulties compared to age-matched, typically achieving children. We used the flanker task, which requires participants to respond to a central target flanked by distractors, and the feature and conjunction visual search, which requires participants to search for a predesignated target embedded among a variable number of distractors. The results showed that children with attention difficulties encountered major problems only when responding to a central target flanked by adjacent incongruent distractors and when searching for a conjunctive target in a high-density display. These results suggest that children with attention difficulties have a characteristic inability to restrict visual attention to a limited spatial area so as to selectively process relevant information while effectively ignoring distracting information.
Shalev
Lilach
L
Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University of Israel, Tel-Aviv. lilachs@openu.ac.il
Tsal
Yehoshua
Y
D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000150:complications* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014796:Visual Perception