Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses
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ItemA longitudinal study of attention and inhibitory control in 6- to 11-year-old children( 2017)Attention and inhibitory control are important cognitive abilities. Attention consists of three components: activation, selection, and control. The activation of attention involves alertness, the maintenance of response readiness, and sustained attention. The selection of attention involves reflexive and voluntary shifts of attention to a specific location or point in time, and the breaking and reorienting of attention. The control of attention involves resolution of conflict, such as that induced by distractors, and inhibitory control. There is a lack of longitudinal data on the development of these aspects of attention in typically developing children, so their developmental trajectories remain unclear. The aim of this thesis was to map the developmental trajectories of alerting, sustained attention, orienting, reorienting, conflict resolution and inhibitory control. Participants involved in this research were 114 children aged 6, 8, or 10 years at study onset, referred to as the 6-7, 8-9, and 10-11 groups. Children performed three attention tasks, three times at 6-monthly intervals. The Attention Network Task (ANT) measures alerting, orienting, reorienting, and conflict resolution. The Random Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) and the Fixed SART measure sustained attention and response inhibition; they require frequent responding with infrequent inhibition to a No-Go target. Intra-individual variability of response time (RT) during the SART was analysed with a Fast Fourier Transform and an ex-Gaussian model of RT data. Results indicate that each component of attention followed a different rate of development. In terms of activation, there was ongoing maturation throughout the study. The functioning of the alerting network, as measured by the ANT, improved over the year in all children. There was, however, little difference in alerting score between the two youngest groups, suggesting greater maturation of alerting after 9 years of age than before. Findings for sustained attention were task-dependent: during the arousing Random SART, there were few differences in performance between the two older groups, but during the unengaging Fixed SART, the 8-9 group mostly performed at an intermediate level compared with the other groups. The 8-9 group exhibited greater momentary fluctuations in response time and made more very long responses than the 10-11 group on both SARTs, indicating more momentary lapses in attention. The 6-7 group performed less well than the older groups on most measures on both SARTs. The selection of attention - the orienting and reorienting networks as measured by the ANT - showed no developmental changes during the study. Control of attention - conflict resolution and response inhibition as measured by the ANT and Random SART - was relatively stable from 7 and 8 years respectively. This thesis proposes that between 6 and 7 years is an important period for the development of attention and response inhibition. There may be some level of developmental stability between 8 and 11 years on unpredictable engaging tasks. The ability to self-sustain attention and arousal on an unarousing unengaging task, however, appears to follow a protracted maturation throughout childhood.