Moving to Capture Children's Attention: Developing a Methodology for Measuring Visuomotor Attention

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 11; no. 7; p. e0159543
• Main Authors: Hill, Liam J B, Coats, Rachel O, Mushtaq, Faisal, Williams, Justin H G, Aucott, Lorna S, Mon-Williams, Mark
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 19.07.2016; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adult; Adults; Analysis; Assessments; Attention (Psychology); Attention - physiology; Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; Autism; Biology and Life Sciences; Child; Child Development - physiology; Children; Children & youth; Classrooms; Cognitive ability; Construction standards; Developmental stages; Ecological monitoring; Female; Humans; Hyperactivity; Male; Medical research; Medical screening; Medicine and Health Sciences; Mental health; Middle Aged; Motor ability; Motor Skills - physiology; Movement; Oculomotor behavior; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Pediatrics; Posture; Psychological aspects; Psychomotor performance; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Quantitative psychology; Research and Analysis Methods; Sensorimotor integration; Social Sciences; Software; Styli; Task Performance and Analysis; Visual perception; Visual tasks; United Kingdom > UK; Scotland
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0159543

Attention underpins many activities integral to a child's development. However, methodological limitations currently make large-scale assessment of children's attentional skill impractical, costly and lacking in ecological validity. Consequently we developed a measure of 'Visual Motor Attention' (VMA)-a construct defined as the ability to sustain and adapt visuomotor behaviour in response to task-relevant visual information. In a series of experiments, we evaluated the capability of our method to measure attentional processes and their contributions in guiding visuomotor behaviour. Experiment 1 established the method's core features (ability to track stimuli moving on a tablet-computer screen with a hand-held stylus) and demonstrated its sensitivity to principled manipulations in adults' attentional load. Experiment 2 standardised a format suitable for use with children and showed construct validity by capturing developmental changes in executive attention processes. Experiment 3 tested the hypothesis that children with and without coordination difficulties would show qualitatively different response patterns, finding an interaction between the cognitive and motor factors underpinning responses. Experiment 4 identified associations between VMA performance and existing standardised attention assessments and thereby confirmed convergent validity. These results establish a novel approach to measuring childhood attention that can produce meaningful functional assessments that capture how attention operates in an ecologically valid context (i.e. attention's specific contribution to visuomanual action).