Staying and Returning dynamics of young children's attention

In this paper, we decompose selective sustained attending behavior into components of continuous attention maintenance and attentional transitions and study how each of these components develops in young children. Our results in two experiments suggest that changes in children's ability to return attention to a target locus after distraction (“Returning”) play a crucial role in the development of selective sustained attention between the ages of 3.5–6 years, perhaps to a greater extent than changes in the ability to continuously maintain attention on the target (“Staying”). We further distinguish Returning from the behavior of transitioning attention away from task (i.e., becoming distracted) and investigate the relative contributions of bottom-up and top-down factors on these different types of attentional transitions. Overall, these results (a) suggest the importance of understanding the cognitive process of transitioning attention for understanding selective sustained attention and its development, (b) provide an empirical paradigm within which to study this process, and (c) begin to characterize basic features of this process, namely its development and its relative dependence on top-down and bottom-up influences on attention.

Research Highlights

• Young children exhibited an endogenously ability, Returning, to preferentially transition attention to task-relevant information over task-irrelevant information.
• Selective sustained attention and its development were decomposed into Returning and Staying, or task-selective attention maintenance, using novel eye-tracking-based measures.
• Returning improved between the ages of 3.5–6 years, to a greater extent than Staying.
• Improvements in Returning supported improvements in selective sustained attention between these ages.

     

Peer Sociometric Status and Personality Development from Middle Childhood to Preadolescence

Sociometric status, the regard that other group members confer to an individual, is one of the most ubiquitous and behaviourally relevant attributes assigned to the person by the social environment. Despite this, its contribution to personality development has received little attention. The present three‐wave longitudinal study, spanning the age range 7–13 years (n = 1222), sought to fill this gap by examining the transactional pathways between peer sociometric status (measured by peer nominations) and Five‐Factor personality traits (measured by self‐ratings and parent and teacher ratings). Sociometric status prospectively predicted the development of extraversion. By contrast, agreeableness and neuroticism prospectively predicted the development of sociometric status. Furthermore, individual‐level stability in extraversion was associated with individual‐level stability in sociometric status. The results were robust across different sources of personality ratings. We argue that peer sociometric status in the school classroom is the type of environmental effect that has potential to explain personality development. Because of its stability, broadness, and possible impact across a variety of personality processes, sociometric status can both repetitiously and simultaneously influence the network of multiple inter‐correlated micro‐level personality processes, potentially leading to a new network equilibrium that manifests in changes at the level of the broad personality trait. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology