Age differences in children's performance on measures of component selection and incidental learning

Abstract Children of ages 5 and 8 years were given one of three learning tasks: a component selection problem, in which the two components of the stimuli were redundant and could both serve as functional cues, and two incidental learning tasks, in which one stimulus component was task-relevant and the other was incidental. A posttest, measuring the children's recall for information about each component separately, was assumed to reflect the degree of attention directed to each component during learning. Attention to the nondominant component was found to increase with age when this feature was redundant with the dominant component but not when it was incidental. These results suggest a developmental improvement in the flexibility of attention deployment; as children grow older they tend increasingly to differentiate between situations in which it is useful to attend to several stimulus features and situations in which it is more advantageous to attend selectively.