Meta-Attention: The Development of Awareness of the Attentional Process

Summary

Meta-attention, or an individual's understanding of the attentional process, was investigated. Recent evidence was reviewed suggesting that maturity would alter an understanding of attention, with young children viewing attention as controlled by external forces, such as distraction or contingent reward, while older children would value internal factors, such as interest level. The question was posed whether, given the assumption of the existence of such a pattern, meta-attention would be correlated with academic achievement. A meta-attentional task was devised which required four age groups of children to make forced choices concerning the relative importance of distraction, interest, and reward. Results clearly supported the assumption that meta-attention is developmentally sensitive. A significant, but weak relationship was detected between meta-attention and achievement.