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. The ability to switch our focus between tasks or external stimuli is called divided attention or multitasking. This is separate from our ability to focus on a single task or stimulus while ignoring distracting information, called selective attention. Different from these is sustained attention, or the ability to stay on task for long periods of time. Moreover, we also have attention processes that influence our behavior and enable us to inhibit a habitual or dominant response and others that enable us to distract ourselves when upset or frustrated.

7.5.1 Divided Attention

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, but by age 5, they have surpassed the chimp (Hermann et al., 2015; Hermann & Tomasello, 2015). Despite these improvements, 5-year-olds continue to perform below the level of school-age children, adolescents, and adults.

7.5.2 Selective Attention

Children’s ability with selective attention tasks improves as they age. However, this ability is also greatly influenced by the child’s temperament (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005), the complexity of the stimulus or task (Porporino et al., 2004), and along with whether the stimuli are visual or auditory (Guy et al., 2013). Guy et al. (2013) found that children’s ability to selectively attend to visual information outpaced that of auditory stimuli. This may explain why young children cannot hear the teacher’s voice over the cacophony of sounds in the typical preschool classroom (Figure 7.2) (Jones et al., 2015). Jones and his colleagues found that 4–7-year-olds could not filter out background noise, especially when its frequencies were close in sound to the target sound. In comparison, 8–11-year-old children often performed similarly to adults.

Figure 7.2. A group of children making crafts.

7.5.3 Sustained Attention

Most measures of sustained attention typically ask children to spend several minutes focusing on one task, while waiting for an infrequent event, while there are multiple distractors for several minutes. Berwid et al. (2005) asked children between the ages of 3 and 7 to push a button whenever a “target” image was displayed, but they had to refrain from pushing the button when a non-target image was shown (Figure 7.3). The younger the child, the more difficulty he or she had maintaining their attention.

Figure 7.3. A child playing a game that measures their sustained attention.