The development of visual-motor search and the use of redundant information

Abstract

The purposes of these studies were to assess the generality of previously observed developmental trends in visual attention and to identify age changes in children’s use of redundant information in a visual-motor search task. In the first study, children and adults searched for and retrieved target letters in collections of colored plastic letters. The collections varied in the degree to which the colors of the targets were correlated with their shapes. Search times were faster in redundant conditions than in nonredundant conditions, and the search times increased further in speed over trials in most redundant conditions. Older subjects increased in efficiency of search earlier in the task than younger subjects did. In the second study, children of the three youngest age groups searched for target letters in three redundant conditions. There were age differences in how the children used redundancy to aid visual search. The youngest children used it best if they were told of its presence, whereas older children used it equally well if they discovered it themselves.