In developmental attention research, analyze age groups separately and use multiple probe types¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 6 claims (6 for) · 1 study (1 causal), q3 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 6 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The authors recommend that developmental attention studies avoid pooling across ages and include diverse sound types. They state "researchers conducting future attention studies of children and adolescents should be wary of combining analyses across diverse ages", and that "it is important to use various types of sounds in developmental studies since evoked-potentials showed different maturational profiles for different probe types". They also advise accounting for maturational latency shifts, since fixed time windows across ages may obscure earlier-latency attention effects in younger children.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Analyses must account for maturational changes in peak latency when measuring attention effects across age groups

Constraints¶

• Cross-sectional averaging by age overlooks individual differences in maturation; the high-maternal-education adolescent sample may not represent adolescents from varied socioeconomic backgrounds

Target Learners¶

• children and adolescents across early childhood to late adolescence

Target Learning Goals¶

• measurement of auditory selective attention development

Claims¶

• The effect of attention on linguistic-probe P1 latency interacts with age group [+W]
• Attention robustly increases linguistic-probe late-N1 amplitude from age 10 through adulthood [+W]
• Linguistic-probe late-N1 latency decreases with age, unlike the stable early-N1 latency for nonlinguistic probes [+W]
• Attention increases nonlinguistic-probe P1 amplitude in adults and 13-year-olds, but modulation is weak or absent in 16-year-olds [+W]
• P1 latency for nonlinguistic auditory probes decreases with age from childhood through adulthood [+W]
• Nonlinguistic-probe P2 latency increases with age from 10 years into adulthood [+W]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Karns Christina M., Isbell Elif, Giuliano Ryan J., Neville Helen J. (2015). Auditory attention in childhood and adolescence: An event-related potential study of spatial selective attention to one of two simultaneous stories. Developmental cognitive neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2015.03.001