DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES IN CUED ATTENTION GIVEN ORDERED INFORMATION

The two experiments in this paper provide a developmental approach to the decision- making patterns seen in children and adults when trained with overlapping cues. Experiment 1 compares adult performance on different versions of the highlighting task consisting of text based or image based stimuli. Robust order effects were found for both tasks, and the image based version was concluded to be comparable to previous literature (Medin & Edelson, 1988; Kruschke, 2009). Experiment 2 found order effects in preschool-aged children with the image based design, and differences in cued attention based on age. Younger children found it more difficult to learn combined cues separately. Younger children were also more likely to show highlighting effects for the novel cues that equally predict either outcome. Older children were more accurate on singular ambiguous cues. Implications for developmental differences in attending to specific cues over time are discussed.