Moving to Capture Children's Attention: Developing a Methodology for Measuring Visuomotor Attention
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...
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Published in | PloS one Vol. 11; no. 7; p. e0159543 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Public Library of Science
19.07.2016
Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | 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). |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Conceived and designed the experiments: LH JHGW LA MMW. Performed the experiments: LH. Analyzed the data: LH LA ROC. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: LH JHGW MMW. Wrote the paper: LH FM ROC JHGW LA MMW. Provided additional novel interpretations of the results of this research (in the course of helping to draft the manuscript): FM. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. |
ISSN: | 1932-6203 1932-6203 |
DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0159543 |