Abstract
Present study evaluates the changes and developmental trajectories of the attentional serial visual search and pre-attentional parallel search (pop-out) in situations in which a fast response is required. The hypothesis of present study are 1) that pre-attentional selection mechanisms develop before than serial attentional processes; 2) in the most difficult tasks, children prefer to adopt a non-responding strategy to an impulsive response patters; and 3) in speeded difficult discrimination tasks young children arrives to the criteria of correct performance in a broad temporal window. The results showed an inverse relationship between the age and the RTs and the different type of errors. For the present set of stimuli which produces an overcrowded scene and required a fast response, the behavioural trend of normal children is to the non-response pattern rather than to impulsive incorrect responses pattern. It can be suggested that young normal children present a broad temporal window to obtain the perceptual, motor and/or cognitive skills needed for responding adequately in a fast speeded discrimination task.
Highlights
One of the most fruitful approaches trying to understand attention is the visual search paradigm
If the distracters differentiate from the target in one single feature, the search occurs in parallel and there is not an increase of RTs as the number of distractors items in the display increases
In the single feature case, the object would be processed in a single visual map while in the conjunction feature the internal visual maps involved in the different features would be bound through the spatial position map, and the neural representations of the different maps would be analyzed serially by using attentional resources
Summary
One of the most fruitful approaches trying to understand attention is the visual search paradigm This experimental procedure permits to understand the subject’s ability to detect a target stimulus in an array of distractors (Treisman, 1986; Treisman & Gormican, 1988). In this paradigm subjects are presented with a target stimulus in a random spatial position in an array of distracters, which differentiates from targets in one or several visual features. As not all types of features follow this increase in slope with the number of dis-
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