Abstract:

PURPOSE: The current study sought to identify the neurophysiological bases of development in covert spatial attention, focusing on electroencephalographic (EEG) markers of attentional selection (N2pc) and suppression (PD).
METHODS: EEG data were collected from healthy young adults (aged 19–29 years) and typically developing children (ages 9–15 years), while they searched for a shape singleton target either with the absence (Experiment 1) or presence (Experiment 2) of a task-irrelevant color singleton distractor.
RESULTS: The results showed that the lateral shape target elicited a prolonged and smaller N2pc in children (n = 25) compared to adults (n = 28) in Experiment 1. Moreover, the target-elicited N2pc was followed by a similar positivity in both children and adults. In Experiment 2, we replicated the reduced target-elicited N2pc in children. Counterintuitively, the lateral salient-but-irrelevant color distractor elicited a larger PD in children (n = 22) than in adults (n = 31). We found no evidence for a correlation between the reduced target-elicited N2pc and the increased distractor-elicit PD in children.
CONCLUSIONS: Our results provide neurophysiological evidence that covert spatial attention in children of 9-15 years old is still undergoing significant development. Compared to adults, children deploy insufficient attention resources to the targets and use more attentional suppression to resist to the silent-but-irrelevant distractors. However, the development of target selection and distractor suppression might depend on distinct cognitive mechanisms.

Key words: attentional selection, attentional suppression, development, N2pc, PD