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Children's Avoidance of Envionmental, Simple Task Internal, and Complex Task Internal Distractors

1982; Wiley; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8624.1982.tb03448.x

1467-8624

Mary M. Humphrey,

Cognitive Abilities and Testing

HUMPHREY, MARY M. Children's Avoidance of Environmental, Simple Task Internal, and Complex Task Internal Distractors. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 736-745. The study examined distraction effects in terms of the information processing necessary to discriminate distractors from task-relevant information and a child's ability to meet those demands. Environmental distractors, those not part of the task materials, required only task-nontask decisions. Distractors which were part of the task materials required either the processing of single-stimulus features (Simple Internal distraction) or multiple-stimulus features (Complex Internal distraction) for distractor-target discriminations. Preschool, kindergarten, secondand fourth-grade children's visual recall and recognition performance, under both nondistraction and one of the three types of distraction, revealed Complex Internal distraction was most disruptive, followed by Simple Internal distraction, and Environmental distraction least disruptive. Within grade levels, preschoolers were disrupted by all distraction, kindergartners showed performance decrements for both Simple and Complex Internal distraction, and second graders showed performance decrements for only Complex Internal distraction. Fourth graders did not show any distraction effects.