VISUAL SEARCH IN CHILDREN PROJECT

The main objective of the present project is to study a vital task in everyday life, Visual Search (VS), in typically developing children and children with Attentional Deficit Disorder (ADD). We will try to shed light on inefficient search processes in VS, and we will also try to study basic foraging tasks. All this will be done in a sample of typical developing children (objective 1) and children with ADD (objective 2). We will collect a new set of basic search data in order to address several gaps in the literature, testing children from 4 to 17 years old and young adults of +18 years old.

For VS there is evidence supporting similar performance in efficient searches along children with or without ADD, and adults; showing that bottom-up processes are well-organized in early stages of life, even in infants (Donnelly et al., 2007; Gerhardstein et al., 2002). However, results in inefficient search are inconsistent in children depending on the age (see Hommel, Li & Li, 2004), and also in ADDs (Mullane & Kane, 2008). Establishing how search patterns develop along childhood will help us to understand attention in VS, and more importantly to comprehend attentional processes in ADDs.

However, the standard search task is fairly limited, specifically for search termination rules. Those limitations can be elucidated using a foraging task. The present study will test a basic foraging task in children, but for more information in Foraging studies in children see FORAGEKID project: https://sites.google.com/site/bgilgomezdelianno/foragekid-project