Endogenously- but not Exogenously-driven Selective Sustained Attention is Related to Learning in a Classroom-like Setting in Kindergarten Children

Endogenously- but not Exogenously-driven Selective Sustained Attention is Related to Learning in a Classroom-like Setting in Kindergarten Children Lucy C. Erickson (lerickso@andrew.cmu.edu) Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213 USA Erik D. Thiessen (thiessen@andrew.cmu.edu) Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213 USA Karrie E. Godwin (kegodwin@andrew.cmu.edu) Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213 USA John P. Dickerson (dickerson@cs.cmu.edu) Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA Anna V. Fisher (fisher49@andrew.cmu.edu) Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213 USA (e.g., Wei, Wang, & Klausner, 2012). Despite agreement on the importance of SSA for human learning and performance, several key theoretical questions about the development of attention, and the relation between attentional processes and learning outcomes, remain unresolved. One of the challenges in addressing questions about the relation between attention and learning is the paucity of appropriate experimental paradigms, particularly for preschool-age children. With regards to assessment of SSA, preschoolers are in a measurement gap: they are too old for the assessment tools used with infants and toddlers, but often too young to generate usable data on adult tasks adapted for use with children (e.g., Continuous Performance Task; for review see Fisher & Kloos, in press). Additionally, any paradigm assessing young children’s SSA needs to be similarly motivating across a range of ages, such that age- related changes in young children’s performance can be attributed to changes in psychological processes rather than to age-related differences in the level of motivation and engagement in the task. In order to address this measurement gap we developed a novel paradigm to study SSA in preschool-age children, the Track-It task (Fisher & Kloos, in press; Fisher, Thiessen, Godwin, Kloos, & Dickerson, 2013). In the Track-It task participants visually track a target moving along a random trajectory on a grid. The target can be accompanied by several distractors, also moving along random trajectories. The participants’ task is to report the last grid location visited by the target before it disappears. Prior research with the Track-It task has primarily focused on disentangling the endogenous and exogenous factors that support SSA. Exogenous factors relate to the characteristics Abstract Selective sustained attention (SSA) is vital for higher order cognition. Although endogenous and exogenous factors influence SSA, assessment of the degree to which these factors influence performance and learning is often challenging. We report findings from the Track-It task, a paradigm that aims to assess the contribution of endogenous and exogenous factors to SSA within the same task. Behavioral accuracy and eye-tracking data on the Track-It task were correlated with performance on a learning task. Behavioral accuracy and fixations to distractors did not predict learning when exogenous factors supported SSA. In contrast, fixations to distractors were negatively correlated with learning when endogenous factors supported SSA. Similarly, higher behavioral accuracy was correlated with greater learning when endogenous factors supported SSA. These findings suggest that although children showed equivalent levels of distractibility when exogenous and endogenous factors supported SSA, different conditions of the Track-It task likely engaged different attentional control mechanisms. Keywords: selective attention; sustained attention; attention and learning; measurement; exogenous and endogenous factors Introduction Selective sustained attention (SSA) is the ability to process some parts of the environment at the exclusion of others over a period of time, an ability that has been argued to be fundamental to learning. In particular, selective sustained attention has been implicated in contexts ranging from infants learning their first words (e.g., Yu & Smith, 2012) to college students learning in formal educational settings