3 Development of Children/s

Attention to Stimulus Components

GORDON A. HALE

Introduction

It is generally recognized that selective attention plays an important role in

cognition (e.g., Broadbent, 1971; Gibson, 1969). People do not necessarily
process or "take in" all of the sensory information to which they are ex-
posed but often may select certain information on which to concentrate their
attention. Among the ways in which selective attention functions is in the
discrimination of objects. Typically, objects in the world differ in several
components ("features," "dimensions"), such as their shape, color, or size.
When differentiating among objects an individual may not make use of all
these components but may attend only to a selected portion of them. Thus,
for example, a person may distinguish an object from others principally on
the basis of a single component, such as its shape, even though the objects
may differ in a number of features.
A popular topic of developmental inquiry concerns children's ability to
exercise selective attention. Research on this topic includes studies of chil-
dren's concept identification (e.g., Zeaman & House, 1963), intra- and
extradimensional shifts (e.g., Tighe & Tighe, 1972), and incidental learning
(e.g., Hagen, 1972). These studies have shown that with increasing mental
age, children become better able to detect and maintain an orientation to a
task-relevant component of stimulus objects.
An issue that has largely been neglected concerns the way children
typically approach stimulus objects. Much of the developmental research
on selective attention has dealt with children's ability to attend to stimulus
information that has been designated by an experimenter as task-relevant.
It has generally remained to be determined how children of different ages
identify multi component stimuli if allowed to discriminate among them

GORDON A. HALE· Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey 08541.

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G. A. Hale et al. (eds.), Attention and Cognitive Development

© Plenum Press, New York 1979
44 GORDON A. HALE

according to their natural inclination. Do children of a given age typically

attend selectively to a single stimulus component, or do they attend to
several components in combination? The issue is one of children's disposi-
tion or natural tendency to exercise selective attention and is quite distinct
from the question of children's ability to attend selectively to a specified
stimulus component.
This is a fundamental issue in the study of selective attention and its
development. Theories of perceptual development (e.g., Gibson, 1969)
place particular stress on understanding how the growing child normally
perceives and interacts with the multicomponent objects that make up the
environment. Furthermore, the study of children's tendency toward selec-
tivity is essential for interpretation of much existing attentional data. If
there is a developmental increase in children's natural disposition to attend
selectively, then this trend could be largely responsible for previously ob-
served age differences in selective attention; with age, children simply be-
come more inclined to concentrate on a single component of a stimulus.
However, if children's natural tendency toward selectivity does not increase
with age, then previous findings likely reflect a developmental improvement
in children's ability to deal with tasks that specifically require selective
attention. In short, assessment of the way children typically attend to the
components of a stimulus object (or "deploy attention" to stimulus compo-
nents) is essential for interpreting the results of research involving experi-
mentally imposed constraints on attention.
The stimulus information to which a person attends is often called the
"functional stimulus," in that such information provides the basis on which
he discriminates the stimulus from others in the environment. For example,
if a person identifies an object by its shape, even though the object consists
of information about color and other dimensions as well, then the functional
stimulus in this case is the object's shape. The issue raised in the preceding
paragraph has to do with the nature of the functional stimulus under non-
constrained circumstances, or circumstances in which children are allowed
to discriminate among stimuli according to their natural inclination. An-
other important issue concerns children's flexibility of attention, or readi-
ness to alter the functional stimulus when it is advantageous to do so. In a
nonconstrained situation, if children of a given age attend to selected stimu-
lus information, they may be doing so for either of two reasons. They may
be identifying the stimuli the same way they would in all other situations,
or they may be acting according to the decision that it is most useful to
identify the stimuli in this way in this particular situation. To determine
children's flexibility in controlling their manner of attention deployment, it
is essential not only to examine the way they identify stimuli in a single-
task situation but also to look at the way they respond to variation in the
attentional demands of the task. .
These two issues, development of children's disposition toward selec-