Attention and time estimation in 5- and 8-year-old children: a dual-task procedure

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Abstract

This experiment tested the effect of a dual-task on time reproduction in 5- and 8-year-olds. Children had to reproduce a stimulus duration lasting for 6 or 12 s, during which they either did or did not perform a concurrent non-temporal task (i.e. picture naming) both in low (LA) and high (HA) attentional demand conditions. The results showed that children reproduced shorter durations in the dual-task than in the single-task condition, whatever the duration value used. However, this shortening effect was greater in the 5-year-olds than in the 8-year-olds. Furthermore, in the 5-year-olds, temporal reproductions were significantly shorter in both dual-tasks (LA or HA) than in the single-task, whereas, in the 8-year-olds, differences reached significance only between the HA dual-task and the single-task. In the non-temporal task, the proportion of naming errors was also greater in the dual-task than in the single-task, especially under high attentional demand, but it did not significantly differ between the two age groups tested.

Introduction

Over the last 20 years, duration has been considered as information that is processed in the same way as any other type of information, and whose encoding under prospective conditions, in which participants are forewarned that they have to perform a temporal task, requires attentional resources (Michon and Jackson, 1984). Thus, when subjects perform a temporal and a non-temporal task simultaneously, the processing of these different types of information may compete for the same limited pool of attentional resources. Attentional models (Thomas and Weaver, 1975, Zakay, 1989) predict that the more attentional resources are allocated to the non-temporal task, the fewer the resources available for temporal processing, and durations are estimated as being shorter. Based on the principle of the pacemaker-accumulator internal clock (Church, 1984, Gibbon, 1977, Gibbon et al., 1984), these models explain this shortening effect by a loss of pulses accumulated in the cognitive timer during the encoding period: The smaller the number of pulses that are accumulated, the shorter the subjective duration is perceived to be (for reviews Casini and Macar, 1999, Lejeune, 1998).

The attentional models’ predictions about the shortening of subjective duration with the decrease of attentional resources allocated to time have been extensively validated in human adults by studies using a dual-task paradigm (e.g. Burle and Casini, 2001, Casini and Macar, 1997, Fortin, 1999, Fortin and Massé, 1999, Fortin and Rousseau, 1998, Macar et al., 1994, Zakay et al., 1983, Zakay et al., 1999). In contrast, few studies have investigated children's timing performance using the same paradigm (Block et al., 1999). However, Arlin, 1986a, Arlin, 1986b conducted two studies examining 5- to 12-year-old children's temporal performance in a dual-task paradigm by varying the level of attentional demand in the secondary non-temporal task.

In the first study (Arlin, 1986a), the children were required to reproduce a 12 s duration during which they observed 2 or 4 displays of simple or complex shapes under a higher (matching) or a lower (looking) attentional demand condition. In the second study (Arlin, 1986b), a 9 s interval had to be reproduced, and the children named (low attentional demand), or categorised as living or nonliving (high attentional demand) a series of three or six pictures presented at regular intervals. In these studies, there was a main effect of attentional condition showing that the children reproduced shorter durations for the higher than for the LA condition. Arlin was thus the first to show that adult-based attentional models can be generalised to young children's data. Furthermore, Arlin observed changes in the attentional effect on timing performance between the ages of 5 and 8 years. In the children older than 8 years, time estimation exhibited an adult-like sensitivity to attentional manipulations, whereas in the 5- to 6-year-olds, time estimation was unaffected or affected only slightly by such manipulations (Arlin, 1986b, Arlin, 1986a, respectively).

How can we explain these age-related changes in the effect of attentional manipulations on timing performance in a dual-task paradigm? There are several theories explaining developmental changes of attention in terms of attentional resources, as we discuss later (for reviews Cowan, 1997a, Cowan, 1997b, Dempster and Brainerd, 1995). These theories agree that the total amount of available resources increases with age. Consequently, whenever the amount of available attentional resources is less in the 5-year-olds than in the 8-year-olds, we might expect a greater interference effect of non-temporal tasks on time estimates in the youngest children. Contrary to this expectation, Arlin observed a lesser effect.

However, the experimental conditions used by Arlin may have tended to mask the greater attentional effect on timing performance in the youngest children for several reasons. Firstly, Arlin only used two dual-tasks of different levels of difficulty. However, in the 5-year-olds, who have limited mental resources, changes in timing performance as a function of the degree of attentional demand may be relatively more important between a single-task and a dual-task than between two dual-tasks. Indeed, as their attentional resources can be rapidly depleted, a supplementary increase of attentional demand may produce a sort of ‘ceiling’ effect on timing performance, i.e. a lack of sensitivity to increasing attentional demand. Secondly, in the dual task, Arlin simultaneously varied the quantity and the attentional demand of non-temporal information. However, at 5–6 years, children are particularly sensitive to the quantity and estimate stimulus durations which contain more events as being longer (i.e. ‘any more is more time’ phenomenon, for a review Levin, 1992). Therefore, this lengthening-based quantity effect may have acted in the opposite way to the shortening attentional effect described above. Thirdly, Arlin observed that the times reproduced by children were systematically shorter in the 5- than in the 8-year-olds, whatever the attentional condition tested. In this case, the reduced attentional effect on younger children's time performance is perhaps related to the values of the durations that they spontaneously produced. However, at least two stimulus duration values are required to test this latter assumption and Arlin only used a single time value.

One aim of the present study was therefore to attempt to replicate the findings obtained by Arlin in 5- and 8-year-old children by comparing their estimates of a stimulus duration lasting 6 or 12 s in single- and dual-task conditions. Another aim of our study was to provide new empirical data on the interference between temporal and non-temporal tasks in these two age groups by recording non-temporal performance both in the dual- and the single-task conditions. We thus investigated not only how the non-temporal task interferes with the temporal task, but also the reverse: how the temporal task interferes with the non-temporal task. In the present study, the non-temporal task was to name familiar objects presented either as a clear black line drawing (lower attentional demand, LA) or as a fuzzy picture that was more difficult to name (higher attentional demand, HA). We expected that the absolute duration reproduced by the children would shorten with an increase in the attentional demand of the non-temporal task. However, we expected the attentional demand effect to be greater in the 5- than in the 8-year-olds. Conversely, for the non-temporal task, the proportion of naming errors should be higher in the dual-task than in the single-task conditions, especially under HA conditions.

Section snippets

Participants

The sample was composed of 33 children: Eighteen 5-year-olds (nine boys and nine girls; mean age=5.31 years, S.D.=0.28) and fifteen 8-year-olds (nine boys and six girls; mean age=7.71 years, S.D.=0.31). The subjects were recruited from nursery and primary schools in Clermont-Ferrand, France.

Materials

The children were tested individually in a quiet room in their school. They were seated in front a Macintosh computer that controlled the experimental events and recorded data with Psyscope (Cohen et al.,

Time reproduction

Fig. 2 shows the mean absolute duration reproduced by the 5- and the 8-year-olds for the 6 and the 12 s stimulus durations in the three task conditions: the single-task, the LA and the HA dual-task conditions.

An overall ANOVA2 tested effects of age (5 or 8 years), duration (6 or 12 s), and tasks (single-task, LA

Discussion

Our experiment investigated the effect of a dual-task with two levels of attentional demand on time reproduction compared to a single-task in 5- and 8-year-old children. The results showed that the subjective duration was shorter in the dual-tasks than in the single-task for both durations used, and whatever the age groups tested. However, our results suggested that this shortening effect between the dual-tasks and the single-task was greater in the 5-year-olds than in the 8-year-olds.

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