Staying and Returning Dynamics of Young Children's Attention

In this paper, we decompose sustained attending behavior into components of continuous attention maintenance and attentional transitions and study how each of these components develops in young children. Our results in two experiments suggest that changes in children's ability to return attention to a target locus after distraction (“Returning”) play a crucial role in the development of sustained attention between the ages of 3.5-6 years, perhaps to a greater extent than changes in the ability to continuously maintain attention on the target (“Staying”). We further distinguish Returning from the behavior of transitioning attention away from task (“Leaving”) and provide evidence that Leaving is more strongly influenced by bottom-up factors, while Returning is invariant to these same bottom-up factors, suggesting a potentially greater contribution of top-down factors in Returning. Overall, these results (a) suggest the importance of understanding the cognitive process of transitioning attention for understanding sustained attention and its development, (b) provide an empirical paradigm within which to study this process, and (c) begin to characterize basic features of this process, namely its development and its relative dependence on top-down and bottom-up influences on attention.