title: Space-based visual attention: a marker of immature selective attention in toddlers?
abstract: Various studies suggested that attentional difficulties cause toddlers' failure in some spatial search tasks. However, attention is not a unitary construct and this study investigated two attentional mechanisms: location selection (space-based attention) and object selection (object-based attention). We investigated how toddlers' attention is distributed in the visual field during a manual search task for objects moving out of sight, namely the moving boxes task. Results show that 2.5-year-olds who failed this task allocated more attention to the location of the relevant object than to the object itself. These findings suggest that in some manual search tasks the primacy of space-based attention over object-based attention could be a marker of immature selective attention in toddlers.
authors: Laboratoire Psychologie et Neurosciences de la Cognition et de l'Affectivite, Universite de Rouen, Mont Saint Aignan, France. james.riviere@univ-rouen.fr.
authors: James
authors: J
authors: Rivière
authors: Julie
authors: J
authors: Brisson
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D015415:Biomarkers; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D015415:Biomarkers
keywords: child; search behavior; selective attention