The effects of selective attention on perceptual priming and explicit recognition in children with attention deficit and normal children

Abstract

Perceptual priming and recognition for attended and unattended pictures at encoding, compared to nonstudied pictures were examined in second and fifth grade schoolchildren with attention deficit (AD) and children without AD. In the study, a visual perceptual priming paradigm was combined with a selective attention procedure at encoding to look for the influence of attention in implicit and explicit memory tasks. The findings showed preserved perceptual priming for attended objects at encoding in second and fifth grade AD children and normal children but only the older children showed reduced perceptual priming for unattended pictures, a result that has been reported in adults (Ballesteros, Reales, García, & Carrasco, 2006). Overall, AD children performed more poorly in the picture fragment completion task than control children, exhibiting a general deficit in the task. The findings suggest that substantial developmental changes occurred in both groups and that attention does not dissociate performance in implicit and explicit memory tasks. The preserved perceptual priming and recognition observed in AD children indicate that they performed normally in effortless memory tasks in which stimuli remain present during testing. These results may have important practical implications as these preserved abilities may be used in the rehabilitation of these children.

Acknowledgements

Preliminary results were presented at the Third International Conference on Memory, Valencia, Spain, July 2001. We acknowledge the financial support of the Comunidad de Madrid (Grant Ref. 0012–00). The authors wish to thank Paloma Gómez for helping with data collection and to the children, parents, teachers, and school directors whose cooperation made the present study possible. We are very grateful to Morton Heller and Ashley Clark for their helpful comments in a previous version of this paper. We also thank Lisa K. Son, Veronica Dark, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful reviews that helped us to improve the manuscript.