PSYC2010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Attention Span, Cognitive Inhibition, Cognitive Flexibility
11 Sep 2018
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Age differences in the ability to attend to a task may lead to differences in the ability to allocate limited mental resources. There are individual differences and age differences in the ability to stay on task or sustain attention. Increases sharply between 2 and 3. 5 years: frontal lobe growth, more complex play goals, adult scaffolding. Improved ability to concentrate benefits language, exploration and problem- solving: as sustained attention increases, children become better at selective attention. Focusing on relevant aspects of a task, while ignoring irrelevant information. Improves with increases in sustained attention: cognitive inhibition, ability to control distracting stimuli, both. 3 yr olds make many errors, but by age 6-7 years, children find tasks easy. Young children often show the same inhibitory problems that adults with frontal lobe lesions show. Childre(cid:374)"s a(cid:271)ility to regulate (cid:271)eha(cid:448)iour i(cid:373)pro(cid:448)es (cid:449)ith age. As children get older, they are better able to execute inhibitory processes.
