Journal
NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA
Volume 44, Issue 11, Pages 2126-2138Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.10.007
Keywords
development; ERP; N100; Nd; endogenous attention; N1
Funding
- NICHD NIH HHS [HD08598] Funding Source: Medline
- NIDCD NIH HHS [F32 DC005291, DC00481, R01 DC000481, DC005291] Funding Source: Medline
- EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH &HUMAN DEVELOPMENT [F32HD008598] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DEAFNESS AND OTHER COMMUNICATION DISORDERS [R01DC000481, F32DC005291] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
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Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests that the development of selective attention extends over the first two decades of life. However, much of this research may underestimate the attention abilities of young children. By providing strong, redundant attention cues, we show that sustained endogenous selective attention has similar effects on ERP indices of auditory processing in adults and children as young as 3 years old. All participants were cued to selectively attend to one of two simultaneously presented stories that differed in location (left/right), voice (male/female), and content. The morphology of the ERP waveforms elicited by probes embedded in the stories was very different for adults, who showed a typical positive-negative-positive pattern in the 300 ms after probe onset, and children, who showed a single broad positivity during this epoch. However, for 3- to 5-year-olds, 6- to 8-year-olds, and adults, probes in the attended story elicited larger amplitude ERPs beginning around 100 ms after probe onset. This attentional modulation of exogenously driven components was longer in duration for the youngest children. In addition, attended linguistic probes elicited a larger negativity 300-500 ms for all groups, indicative of additional attentional processing. These data show that with adequate cues, even children as young as 3 years old can selectively attend to one auditory stream while ignoring another and that doing so alters auditory sensory processing at an early stage. Furthermore, they suggest that the neural mechanisms by which selective attention affects auditory processing are remarkably adult-like by this age. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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