In all stages of life, visual search is a fundamental aspect of everyday tasks from a child, looking for the right Lego blocks, to her parent, searching for lost keys in the living room, to an expert, hunting for signs of cancer in a lung CT. However, while we have a very substantial body of research on visual search in adults, there is a much smaller literature in children, despite the importance of search in cognitive development. This talk will review some recent work and present new data showing that different mechanisms of selective attention operate at different ages within childhood, not only at a quantitative level but also qualitatively. Target salience, child-friendly stimuli and video-game-like tasks may be also important factors modulating attention in childhood, and showing that children’s attentional processes can be more effective than has been believed to date. It will also focus on new results from a visual search foraging task, highlighting it as a potentially useful task in a more complete study of cognitive and attentional development in the real world.
Finally, new groundbreaking data with ADHD-susceptibility children (Attentional Deficit Hyperativitiy Disorder-ADHD) from an inattentional blindness (IB) paradigm in which humans usually fail to notice a salient unexpected event. IB can be, in fact, modulated by ADHD-susceptibility during childhood will be shown. Interestingly, ADHD individuals may show a different cognitive style that could better deal under certain types of tasks in which incidental findings may be crucial, like in medical diagnoses or security search endeavors. This work leads to better understanding of typical and atypical cognitive development, and gives us insights to better understand attentional processes development not only in lab settings but also into the real world.
Speaker: Beatriz Gil-Gómez de Liaño, PhD. RCC Research Fellow, Marie Curie Global Fellow at Cambridge University, UK. Visiting Professor at the Visual Attention Lab at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital-Harvard Medical School, USA. Associate Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. SPAIN (currently at leave) and Researcher of the MSCA Project: FORAGEKID. Foraging Behavior in children: A new way to understand attentional development.
Sponsor: RCC.
LOCATION:RCC Conference Room, 26 Trowbridge St., Cambridge MA STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20190429T170000Z DTEND:20190429T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR