The development of attentional orienting during the school-age years

This study was designed to assess the development of spatial attentional orienting during the school-age years. To that end, we used a cost-benefit attentional cueing task with short (100 ms) and long (800 ms) cue-to-target intervals to examine attentional processing independent of motor skills and perceptual processing in 200 7-17-year-olds and 40 adults. We found that orienting attention, disengaging attention and visual processing in an unattended location, were all progressively more accurate and faster with increasing age. Our data thus suggest that the efficiency of attentional orienting improves in an age-related manner throughout the school-age years.