The development of selective attention: from perceptual exploration to logical search.

Publisher Summary There is a major developmental shift in the nature of the stimulus variables that control attending behavior. This shift is proposed as an important contributor to the development of systematic information processing in children. This chapter proposes a distinction between exploration and search as distinctive modes of information-getting behavior. These two patterns are discriminable in their own right in terms of measurable response properties; they are further discriminable in terms of the stimulus and task features that control them; and they are observed to have a different course of development and period of acquisition. It is argued that exploration is a simpler process that develops earlier than search, it is maintained by different types of motivation, and it provides the germinal perceptual experiences out of which logical, systematic search can evolve when the appropriate cognitive structures for its organization become available. Parallel with the developmental evolution of exploratory schemas into search routines, the evidence reviewed suggests a shift from the control of attention by salient features of stimuli toward its control by logical features of the task and a shift from passively tracked to actively sequenced attending.

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