ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology2018
Attentional fluctuations in preschoolers: Direct and indirect relations with task accuracy, academic readiness, and school performance.
Article in Journal of experimental child psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Lapses of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Intra-Individual Variability in Children's Self-Regulation in Kindergarten Classrooms: An Observational Study.Developmental science · 2026Observational
- Assessing the Impact of Different Social Media Video Content Formats on Sustained Attention and Working Memory.Annals of neurosciences · 2026Article
- Inferring mind wandering from perceptual decision making.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Exploring the Complexity of Children's Math and Vocabulary Learning: The Role of Cognitive, Dispositional, and Parental Factors.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Characterizing the effects of emotional distraction on sustained attention and subsequent memory: A novel emotional gradual onset continuous performance task.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Sensory seeking and its influence on sustained attention performance in adult males with Autism Spectrum Condition.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Family Functioning and Intraindividual Reaction Time Variability Interactively Predict Children's Externalizing Problems.Child psychiatry and human development · 2025Article
- The Developmental Unfolding of ADHD Symptoms from Early Childhood Through Adolescence: Early Effects of Exuberant Temperament, Parenting and Executive Functioning.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2024Article
- A Developmental Pathway from Early Inhibitory Control to Social Connectedness.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2023Article
- Association of adolescent self-esteem in 2014 and cognitive performance in 2014, 2016, and 2018: a longitudinal study.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Intra-individual variability in task performance after cognitive training is associated with long-term outcomes in children.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Pupillometry as a Window into Young Children's Sustained Attention.Journal of Intelligence · 2022Article
- Variable rather than extreme slow reaction times distinguish brain states during sustained attention.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Attentional Fluctuations, Cognitive Flexibility, and Bilingualism in Kindergarteners.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- Neural measures of anticipatory bodily attention in children: Relations with executive function.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2018Article
- Prenatal tobacco and tobacco-cannabis co-exposure: Relationship with attention and memory in middle childhood.Neurotoxicology and teratologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Attentional control fluctuates in the presence of internal and external distractors, wandering on and off a given task. The current study investigated individual differences in attentional fluctuations in 250 preschoolers. Attentional fluctuations were assessed via intra-individual variability in response time in a Go/No-Go task. Greater fluctuations in attentional control were linked to lower task accuracy. In addition, greater attentional fluctuations predicted lower performance in a task of cognitive flexibility, the Dimensional Change Card Sort task. Attentional fluctuations were also associated with laboratory measures of academic readiness in preschool, as assessed by the Applied Problems and Letter-Word Identification subscales of the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement, which in turn predicted teacher reports of academic performance in first grade. Attentional fluctuations also had indirect associations with emergent math skills in preschool, via cognitive flexibility, as well as indirect associations with first-grade teacher reports of academic performance, via the relations between cognitive flexibility and emergent math skills in preschool. These results suggest that consistency is an important aspect of attentional control during early childhood.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.