ArticlePsychological science2017
Costs of Selective Attention: When Children Notice What Adults Miss.
Article in Psychological science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 58 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed.
- Working memory, exploration, and cognitive development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Drivers of exploration early in development: Perceptual novelty rather than a quest for information.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of learning speed reveal developmental differences in memory.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Development of Selective Attention in Children's Emotion Reasoning.Developmental science · 2026Article
- An eye tracking analysis for the assessment of visual attention and preferences of children related to the dentist and dental operatory-a cross-sectional pilot study.European archives of paediatric dentistry : official journal of the European Academy of Paediatric Dentistry · 2026Article
- Working memory shapes information sampling and attention allocation across development.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Attentional Deficits Following Preterm Birth: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- A little imprecision goes a long way in launching memory development.Child development perspectives · 2025Article
- Effect of multi-refresh-rate method on user experience: sustained attention and inattentional blindness.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Reinforcement learning increasingly relates to memory specificity from childhood to adulthood.Nature communications · 2025Article
- How much can children see and report about their experience of a brief glance at a natural scene?Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Exploration, Distributed Attention, and Development of Category Learning.Psychological science · 2024Article
- The development of visual cognition: The emergence of spatial congruency bias.Developmental science · 2024Article
- "The eyes are the window to the representation": Linking gaze to memory precision and decision weights in object discrimination tasks.Psychological review · 2024Article
- Children exhibit superior memory for attended but outdated information compared to adults.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Attentional focusing and filtering in multisensory categorization.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Auditory Category Learning in Children With Dyslexia.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2024Article
- Americans weigh an attended emotion more than Koreans in overall mood judgments.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- From features to categories: The development of inductive generalization.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2023Article
- Disentangling Processing and Storage Accounts of Working Memory Development in Childhood.Developmental review : DR · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
One of the lawlike regularities of psychological science is that of developmental progression-an increase in sensorimotor, cognitive, and social functioning from childhood to adulthood. Here, we report a rare violation of this law, a developmental reversal in attention. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds ( n = 34) and adults ( n = 35) performed a change-detection task that included externally cued and uncued shapes. Whereas the adults outperformed the children on the cued shapes, the children outperformed the adults on the uncued shapes. In Experiment 2, the same participants completed a visual search task, and their memory for search-relevant and search-irrelevant information was tested. The young children outperformed the adults with respect to search-irrelevant features. This demonstration of a paradoxical property of early attention deepens current understanding of the development of attention. It also has implications for understanding early learning and cognitive development more broadly.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.