Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale · 1998 · 47 citations · 3 references
MedicinePsychologyVision ScienceChild DevelopmentDevelopmental PsychologyVisual PerceptionAttention DevelopmentDevelopment Of Visual AttentionReaction TimeSelective AttentionSpatial AttentionVisual SearchDistractor ProcessingParallel SearchSearch DifficultySearch StrategiesSerial SearchVisual Reaction TimeVisual Search PerformanceYoung Adulthood
Visual search performance was examined in three groups of children 7 to 12 years of age and in young adults. Colour and orientation feature searches and a conjunction search were conducted. Reaction time (RT) showed expected improvements in processing speed with age. Comparisons of RT's on target-present and target-absent trials were consistent with parallel search on the two feature conditions and with serial search in the conjunction condition. The RT results indicated searches for feature and conjunctions were treated similarly for children and adults. However, the youngest children missed more targets at the largest array sizes, most strikingly in conjunction search. Based on an analysis of speed/accuracy trade-offs, we suggest that low target-distractor discriminability leads to an undersampling of array elements, and is responsible for the high number of misses in the youngest children.
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