Developmental Reversals in Attention

One of the law-like regularities of psychological science is that of developmental progression – an increase in sensorimotor, cognitive, and social functioning from childhood to adulthood. Here we report a rare violation of this law – a developmental reversal in attention. In Experiment 1, 4to-5-year-olds (N= 34) and adults (N = 35) performed a change detection task that included externally cued and uncued shapes. Whereas adults outperformed children on the cued shapes, children outperformed adults on the uncued shapes. In Experiment 2, the same participants completed a visual search task and their memory was tested for search-relevant and searchirrelevant information. Again, young children outperformed adults with respect to searchirrelevant features. This paradoxical reversal reveals a novel and surprising property of early attention, thus deepening our understanding of the development of attention. It also affects our understanding of early learning and of cognitive development more broadly.