The spans of apprehension (the amount of information processed simultaneously from a brief visual display) of 19 hyperactive and 19 normal boys (6-10 years old) were compared with a forced-choice letter-recognition task developed by W. Estes. (Author/CL)

Robust interference effects were found which declined with age. Manipulating discriminability of the relevant stimulus dimension resulted in large changes in sorting time, but interference effects did not vary with baseline difficulty. These results were interpreted as strongly supporting both an absolute decrement model and a developmental trend…

Examined visual fixation in infants 6 months to 2 years old for fit with theory of attentional inertia. Found that fixations had lognormal distribution, heart rate decreased during a look, and heart rate returned to prestimulus levels immediately before look offset. Older children showed different looking patterns to two types of stimuli; younger…

Vigilance performance of twenty fourth-grade retarded readers was compared with that of twenty normal readers matched for age, sex, grade, and intelligence. (Authors)

Children (ages 5, 7, and 9 years) and young adults completed two visual attention tasks that required them to make a forced choice identification response to a target shape presented in the center of a computer screen. In the first task (high correlation condition) each target was flanked with the same distracters on 80% of the trials (valid…

A cue-target visual attention task was administered to 25 children (ages 10-12) with dyslexia. Results showed a general pattern of slower responses in the children with dyslexia compared to controls. Subjects also had longer reaction times in the short and long cue-target interval conditions (covert and overt shift of attention). (Contains…

Two studies evaluated the effects of within-task and competing visual stimulation on the mathematics performance and behavior of 17 children (ages 8-14) with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Results indicate the same high within-task simulation that enhanced student performance and reduced off-task behavior was effective only when…

Discusses changes occurring in two-, four-, and six-month-old infants' visual attention span, through a series of experiments examining their ability to orient to peripheral visual stimuli. The results obtained were consistent with the hypothesis that infants get faster with age in shifting attention to a spatial location. (AA)