The development of and interaction among alerting, orienting, and executive attention in children

Abstract

A sex-balanced sample (N = 96) of children from age 6.5 to age 12.5 completed a modified Attention Network Test. Across these ages, we found evidence for developmental changes to alerting and executive control but stable orienting. Additionally, we found that the youngest members of our sample manifested an interaction between alerting and executive control that is opposite to that typically found in adults; a reversal that diminishes with age to achieve the adult pattern by the older end of the age range of our sample.

Keywords:

• Development
• Alerting Attention
• Orienting attention
• Executive attention
• Children

Jennifer Mullane was supported by a Doctoral student award from the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation and a Category A grant from the IWK Health Centre. This study was completed for partial fulfilment of Jennifer Mullane’s doctoral dissertation.