Selective Attention

From infancy, we constantly choose where to focus attention, which necessarily includes some stimuli and excludes others. At some point, children must selectively attend to stimuli that are important for various reasons, including learning. This is where adults play a role in directing children’s attention. But, it is also a skill that children must develop so that they may not be distracted when learning the rules of a game when playing with a sibling, the steps to take when baking with a parent, or the components of a school lesson. How do children develop selective attention?

One study looking at how children aged four to nine focus their visual attention found an impact of mothers’ roles across three countries: Germany, Japan, and Ecuador (Jurkat, Koster, Hernandez Chacon, Itakura and Kartner, 2022). The authors began their investigation by identifying two styles that have been observed in how people focus their attention:

But what about how such styles might develop in children? Much of the previous research on how young children and their parents focus their attention has been done in laboratories using videos that present information differently. The authors of this paper were primarily interested in exploring this difference between East (urban context of Japan) and West (urban context of Germany), but also in expanding the question of the cultural impact on parental patterns of guiding attention to Indigenous cultures of the Americas (rural context of Ecuador) as another interdependent culture.

The methods they used included following where children focused visual attention on a screen (called an eye-tracking task), describing a picture, and a recognition task (where participants had to remember a visual stimulus presented in different ways and sequences). For our purposes, we will focus on the picture description task. This task contained many objects, so the authors expected to see different results between the interdependent and independent cultures. For example, authors thought the two interdependent cultures (Japanese and Ecuadorian) would focus on the broader meaning of the picture and the relationships between these objects, while the independent culture (German) would focus on a particular object central to the picture.

The authors indeed found that parents were directing infants’ attention according to the two styles as they related to culture: the two interdependent cultures, Japan and Ecuador, showed the holistic style in the picture description task, and the independent culture, Germany, showed the analytic style.

In this study, Jurkat et al. (2022) raised the question of how suitable this laboratory-based approach was for these three different cultures, and they also found patterns of results that did not relate to culture at all. Therefore, the whole construct of selective attention and its development mechanisms are difficult to establish. It is neither universal nor dictated solely by culture, so we must continue to explore the ways in which infants and young children choose what to look at or listen to in the many contexts of their lives.

Imagine the implications of these results on infants’ attention development. As an educator or parent looking at a picture book with an infant, you might focus on entirely different features than an early childhood educator in another part of the world. Clearly, the infant would follow your lead in directing their attention. We will look at more work on how this happens. These are the important differences we must consider when we think about children’s attention and the roles of parents and educators in its development.

Another study on picture-book reading compared the development of attention in Eastern and Western infants aged six to 18 months (Senzaki & Shimizu, 2020). The authors looked at picture book reading in Japan and the United States to determine where mothers directed their infants’ attention.

This methodology is different from the Jurkat et al. (2022) study in its use of a common, everyday activity that would be shared between these cultures. So, while the data were collected in a laboratory setting, it would have been a natural interaction between infants and their mothers, in contrast to looking at prompts on a screen, as was the case with Jurkat et al. (2022).

Though both studies had similar findings, the Western group focused their attention on objects that were front and centre in the book, in contrast to the Japanese group that focused their attention on social interactions (Senzaki & Shimizu, 2020). The two groups were able to sustain attention for the same amount of time but were focused on different aspects of the story.

Use the slider below to compare an analytic style (observed in American and German contexts) vs. a holistic style (observed in Ecuadorian and Japanese contexts).