Age-Related Changes in Search Strategies in a Cancellation Task from Childhood to Adolescence

ABSTRACT

Children are limited in visual search accuracy and this ability increases from childhood to adolescence. Developmental limitations in visual search could be related to children’s difficulties in efficiently planning and executing their search, often assessed with cancellation tasks. However, few studies have examined age-related changes in visual search strategies. In the present study, 135 French participants between the ages of 7 to 16 years performed a complex cancellation task. Results showed that the participants improved not only in visual search accuracy and speed with age, but they also organized better their visual search as they got older. Moreover, this improvement seemed linear from age 7 to age 16, suggesting that visual search strategies still improve during adolescence. This finding may be linked to the maturation of specific cerebral networks and opens new perspectives for future studies to better understand visual search processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Normal development
• visual search
• search strategies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

Data are available on the following link: https://osf.io/8yfxs