Abstract
Outside the laboratory, people need to pay attention to relevant objects that are typically multisensory, but it remains poorly understood how the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms develop. We investigated when adult-like mechanisms controlling one’s attentional selection of visual and multisensory objects emerge across childhood. Five-, 7-, and 9-year-olds were compared with adults in their performance on a computer game-like multisensory spatial cueing task, while 129-channel EEG was simultaneously recorded. Markers of attentional control were behavioural spatial cueing effects and the N2pc ERP component (analysed traditionally and using a multivariate electrical neuroimaging framework). In behaviour, adult-like visual attentional control was present from age 7 onwards, whereas multisensory control was absent in all children groups. In EEG, multivariate analyses of the activity over the N2pc time-window revealed stable brain activity patterns in children. Adult-like visual-attentional control EEG patterns were present age 7 onwards, while multisensory control activity patterns were found in 9-year-olds (albeit behavioural measures showed no effects). By combining rigorous yet naturalistic paradigms with multivariate signal analyses, we demonstrated that visual attentional control seems to reach an adult-like state at ∼7 years, before adult-like multisensory control, emerging at ∼9 years. These results enrich our understanding of how attention in naturalistic settings develops.
Highlights
Everyday environments contain many objects, so it is important to select only the relevant ones
We investigated whether electrical neuroimaging (EN) analyses of the N2pc component are better at capturing developmental changes in attentional control over multisensory stimuli than the traditional N2pc analyses
As we previously found both task-set contingent visual attention capture (TAC) and multisensory enhancement of attention capture (MSE) in adults (Matusz and Eimer, 2011), we used these as behavioural markers of top-down visual and bottom-up multisensory control processes
Summary
Everyday environments contain many objects, so it is important to select only the relevant ones. Objects in such environments are multisensory in nature. The brain integrates information across the senses, and so processes multisensory stimuli differently than unisensory stimuli. Most studies focus on attentional control mechanisms engaged by uni sensory (often visual) stimuli. This left aves unclear if attentional control mechanisms operate on unisensory and multisensory stimuli. Matusz and Eimer (2011) has found that task-irrelevant multisensory distractors capture attention more strongly than visual distractors in an audiovisual adaptation of the Folk et al (1992) spatial cuing task.
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