Information Processing is how individuals perceive, analyze, manipulate, use, and remember information. Unlike Piaget’s theory, this approach proposes that cognitive development is ongoing and gradual, not organized into distinct stages. Some of the areas where we see changes include:

• Attention. Improvements are seen in selective attention(the process by which one focuses on one stimulus while tuning out another), as well as divided attention (the ability to pay attention to two or more stimuli at the same time).
• Memory. Improvements are seen in working memory and long-term memory.
• Processing Speed. With maturation, children think more quickly. Processing speed improves sharply between age five and middle adolescence, levels off around age 15, and does not appear to change between late adolescence and adulthood.
• Organization of Thinking. As children mature, they are more planful, they approach problems with strategy, and are flexible in using different strategies in different situations.
• Metacognition. Older children can think about thinking itself. This often involves monitoring one’s own cognitive activity during the thinking process. Metacognitionprovides the ability to plan ahead, see the future consequences of an action, and provide alternative explanations of events.

Attention

Changes in attention have been described by many as the key to changes in human memory (Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Posner & Rothbart, 2007). However, attention is not a unified function; it is comprised of sub-processes. Our ability to focus on a single task or stimulus while ignoring distracting information, called selective attention. There is a sharp improvement in selective attention from age six into adolescence (Vakil, Blachstein, Sheinman, & Greenstein, 2009). Sustained attention is the ability to stay on task for long periods. The ability to switch our focus between tasks or external stimuli is called divided attention or multitasking, which also improves into adolescence (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013).

Video 5.3.1. Attention explains the ways in which we may attend or fail to attend to stimuli.

Selective Attention

The ability with selective attention tasks improves through childhood and into adolescence. While children’s selective attention may be inconsistent during middle childhood, adolescents demonstrate the ability to select and prioritize stimuli for attention reliably. The development of this ability is influenced by the child’s temperament (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005), the complexity of the stimulus or task (Porporino, Shore, Iarocci & Burack, 2004), and may be dependent on whether the stimuli are visual or auditory (Guy, Rogers & Cornish, 2013). Guy et al. (2013) found that children’s ability to attend to visual information selectively outpaced that of auditory stimuli. This change may explain why young children are not able to hear the voice of the teacher over the cacophony of sounds in the typical preschool classroom (Jones, Moore & Amitay, 2015). Jones and his colleagues found that 4 to 7 year-olds could not filter out background noise, especially when its frequencies were close in sound to the target sound. In comparison, teens often performed similarly to adults.

Video 5.3.2. Theories of Selective Attention explains how and why we attend to some stimuli and not others.

Sustained Attention

Most measures of sustained attention typically ask individuals to spend several minutes focusing on one task, while waiting for an infrequent event, while there are multiple distractors for several minutes. Young children can retain their visual and auditory attention for approximately 5 minutes if they are 5-years-old, 6 minutes if they are 6-years old, 7 minutes if they are 7-years-old, and so on. If a task is interesting or novel, the child may sustain attention substantially longer.  Sustained attention improves to around age 10, then plateaus with only small improvements to adulthood. Common estimates of the attention span of healthy teenagers and adults range from 10 to 20 minutes. There is some debate as to whether attention is consistently sustained or whether people repeatedly choose to re-focus on the same thing (Raichle, 2015) This ability to renew attention permits people to ‘pay attention’ to things that last for more than a few minutes.

For time-on-task measurements, the type of activity used in the test affects the results, as people are generally capable of a longer attention span when they are doing something that they find enjoyable or intrinsically motivating (Raichle,2015). Attention is also increased if the person can perform the task fluently, compared to a person who has difficulty performing the task, or to the same person when he or she is just learning the task. Fatigue, hunger, noise, and emotional stress reduce the time focused on the task. After losing attention from a topic, a person may restore it by resting, doing a different kind of activity, changing mental focus, or deliberately choosing to re-focus on the first topic.

Divided Attention

Divided attention can be thought of in a couple of ways. We may look at how well people can multitask, performing two or more tasks simultaneously, or how people can alternate attention between two or more tasks. For example, walking and talking to a friend at the same time is multitasking, where trying to text while driving requires us to alternate attention between two tasks quickly.

Young children (age 3-4) have considerable difficulties in dividing their attention between two tasks and often perform at levels equivalent to our closest relative, the chimpanzee. However, by age five, they have surpassed the chimp (Hermann, Misch, Hernandez-Lloreda & Tomasello, 2015; Hermann & Tomasello, 2015). Despite these improvements, 5-year-olds continue to perform below the level of school-age children, adolescents, and adults. These skills continue to develop into adolescence.

Regardless of age, we have a limited capacity for attention, and the division of attention is confined to that limitation. Our ability to effectively multitask or alternate attention is dependent on the automaticity or complexity of the task, but are also influenced by conditions like anxiety, arousal, task difficulty, and skills (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2012). Research shows that when dividing attention, people are more apt to make mistakes or perform their tasks more slowly (Matlin, 2013). Attention must be divided among all of the component tasks to perform them.

Classical research on divided attention involved people performing simultaneous tasks, like reading stories while listening and writing something else, or listening to two separate messages through different ears. Subjects were often tested on their ability to learn new information while engaged in multiple tasks. More current research examines the performance of doing two tasks simultaneously (Matlin, 2013), such as driving while performing another task. This research reveals that the human attentional system has limits for what it can process. For examples, driving performance is worse while engaged in other tasks; drivers make more mistakes, brake harder and later, get into more accidents, veer into other lanes, and/or are less aware of their surroundings when engaged in the previously discussed tasks (Collet et al., 2009; Salvucci & Taatgen, 2008; Strayer & Drews, 2007).

Video 5.3.3. The Spotlight Model of Attention and Our Ability to Multitask explains how we divide our attention to attend to different tasks or information.