Developmental trends in children's component selection |
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Authors: | Gordon A. Hale Judith S. Morgan |
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Affiliation: | Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N. J. USA |
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Abstract: | A new method is introduced for assessing children's component selection—i.e., the disposition to attend to a single feature of multifaceted stimuli. Eight-year-old children were found to exercise component selection to a lesser degree than 4-year-olds; while children at both age levels attended primarily to one stimulus component (shape), the older children showed a moderate amount of attention to a secondary redundant feature (color) as well. However, a comparable age difference in attention deployment was not observed when a single stimulus dimension (shape) was “relevant” in two variant tasks. These results imply a developmentally increasing ability to distinguish between conditions in which attending to redundant stimulus information can and cannot be useful. That this ability undergoes little further development beyond age 8 was suggested in a second experiment with 8- and 12-year-olds in which the three tasks produced relatively similar developmental trends in performance. |
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Keywords: | Requests for reprints should be sent to: Gordon A. Hale Division of Psychological Studies Educational Testing Service Princeton NJ 08540. |
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