title: The development of organized visual search.
abstract: Visual search plays an important role in guiding behavior. Children have more difficulty performing conjunction search tasks than adults. The present research evaluates whether developmental differences in children's ability to organize serial visual search (i.e., search organization skills) contribute to performance limitations in a typical conjunction search task. We evaluated 134 children between the ages of 2 and 17 on separate tasks measuring search for targets defined by a conjunction of features or by distinct features. Our results demonstrated that children organize their visual search better as they get older. As children's skills at organizing visual search improve they become more accurate at locating targets with conjunction of features amongst distractors, but not for targets with distinct features. Developmental limitations in children's abilities to organize their visual search of the environment are an important component of poor conjunction search in young children. In addition, our findings provide preliminary evidence that, like other visuospatial tasks, exposure to reading may influence children's spatial orientation to the visual environment when performing a visual search.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Center for Functional Neuroimaging, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. adwoods@mail.med.upenn.edu
authors.forename: Adam J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Woods
authors.forename: Tilbe
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Göksun
authors.forename: Anjan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chatterjee
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zelonis
authors.forename: Anika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mehta
authors.forename: Sabrina E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013028:Space Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014796:Visual Perception