The ongoing visual attention research and development program at BA&T is continually expanding our understanding of the fundamental nature of visual attention, primarily in young children and in individuals with developmental disabilities. Notable among our findings, for example, are our discoveries about overselective visual attention.
Overselective visual attention is a perceptual problem that can interfere with the learning and development of a child. Individuals with overselective visual attention respond to only restricted portions of the complex array of features and stimuli in their visual environment. They demonstrate a type of tunnel vision that affects their ability to shift attention among elements of complex stimuli. It is most prevalent among individuals with developmental disabilities, and it is thought that it may explain the difficulty these indviduals commonly have in acquiring appropriate social, language, play, and emotional behaviors.
Our research in this area has revealed several fundamental findings:
- Overselective visual attention does not only occur for individuals with developmental disabilities but also for young children of typical development. A difference between the two populations is the efficiency with which they shift attention among elements of complex visual stimuli (More).
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Overselective visual attention may be due to the disrupting effects of compound training cues, which can be minimized through use of single stimulus pretraining combined with repeated presentations of compound training cues (More).
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Overselective visual attention is not an unmodifiable perceptual characteristic. With appropriate training procedures, individuals with developmental disabilities may be able to acquire essential attentional skills for learning educational tasks involving complex cues (More).
- Overselective visual attention in young children of typical development appears to be temporary, while it is chronic and does not diminish with age in individuals with developmental disabilities. How long overselective visual attention persists is a factor that appears to distinguish children with attentional disturbances and developmental disabilities (Full text article 1).
- Assessing visual attention in children can identify attentional deficits that interfere with academic performance. Utilizing multiple stimulus-control assessment techniques administered by a computer can provide a fine-grained analysis that can reveal differences in how children of similar age attend to letters and words, which is critical information for developing effective reading instruction (Full text article 2).
- Children of typical development can demonstrate overselective attention when word discriminations are presented, but they differ in the degree of their overselective attention. A procedure has been developed that can not only detect overselective attention, but also assess its intensity when word discriminations are presented. Repeated administration of the procedure, with a differential-reinforcement contingency employed during the test trials, can reduce or eliminate overselective attention to words in young children. This has important relevance to a child's academic achievement, since attending to only a limited number of letters within words can interfere with reading acquisition and other areas of development (Full text article 3). Further analysis of the contingencies affecting overselective attention to words in young children was presented in the following article (Full text article 4).
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An effective means for identifying the intensity of overselective attention to words in young children is assessing the amount of single-letter pretraining that is necessary before simultaneous attention to multiple letters occurs (Full text article 5). Early identification of overselective attention to words could result in more individualized and effective reading programs that could significantly impact a child’s later academic achievement.
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Our 2017 Monograph provides an overview of our body of visual attention research findings, and discusses their implications for improving attentional skills that are fundamental for learning to occur in classroom settings (Full text article 6).
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In our 2019 Monograph we also found that recording response topographies in addition to response accuracy with a software-administered procedure in a series of investigations provided a sensitive and fine-grained analysis of individual differences in how young children of typical development and adolescents with developmental disabilities attend to compound stimuli. In addition, administering the stimulus-control procedure online at remote sites where the author was not present also proved to be effective in assessing how participants attended to compound stimuli. (Full text article 7).Our 2023 Monograph expands on the findings of our 2019 monograph by introducing a more fine-grained analysis based on assessment of response latency as a third measure of visual attention. (Full text article 8).Our latest 2024 Monograph revealed that employing response latency demonstrated individual differences in visual attention that were not shown by response accuracies or response topographies. (Full text article 9). Recording response latencies could identify attentional disorders that might not be revealed by other types of assessments. If you missed our latest presentation about the added sensitivity of including response latency in remotely assessing visual attention online at the 95th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Philadelphia PA (29 February - 2 March 2024), you can view that material here (View presentation).
Our research into this critical topic is ongoing. As we increase our understanding of the factors that underlie and control attentional problems, we will continue to make this information freely available to the community through print-medium and electronic publication. See our latest publications in Behavior Analysis & Tehnology Monographs:
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