The Effects Of Cue Validity On Children's Inhibition Of Return

Inhibition of return is a kind of inhibition of visual selective attention,which can improve spatial search speed and efficiency,optimize selective attention of visual environment to make human more adaptive. Some researches have proved that Inhibition of return is not only influenced by exogenous attention,also by endogenous attention.The automatic form of exogenous orienting may develop more rapidly in early infancy and remain more stable throughout the lifespan, whereas more strategic forms of endogenous orienting may develop in a fashion that could be accurately described by an inverted U-shape model. The current study tried to explore the effects of developing endogenous attention on children's inhibition of return.The current study selected Grade 2, Grade 4 of a primary school and Grade 1 of a junior high school,and set three kinds of cue validities according to the relationship between cue validity and endogenous attention,three kinds of Stimulus Onset Asynchronys to find out the effects of endogenous attention on children's inhibition of return.The method was experimentation,the experimental materials were programmed and presented by DMDX software which can automaticly record the reaction time when a participantpushes down the corresponding button.The reaction time to the target appearing on the cued peripheral location minus the reaction time when it appeared on the uncued peripheral location,is the dependent variable.There were two studies,one explored the effects of cue validity on children's inhibition using the detective research paradigm;the other explored the effects using the discrimination research paradigm.Conclusions are as follows:1,The older the children are, on the shorter SOA their inhibition of return appears.The datas under the detective task and the discrimination task consistently show that when Stimulus Onset Asynchrony is 550ms,Grade 2 of the primary school didnot have inhibition of return while Grade 4 of the primary school and Grade 1 of the junior high school did have inhibition of return. 2,In the detective task, as the children are older,the effects of cue validity on their inhibition of return is from none to some.First, cue validity did not influence inhibition of return of Grade 2.When SOA is 750ms,inhibition of return was found under the conditions of three different cue validities.It indicates that when cue validity is much high and a little low, their attention seemed not remain on cued peripheral locations where cues predicted targets much greaterly,but was attracted by succedent centeral cuing.So,when their attention came back from a centeral cued location to a cued peripheral location,the reaction time became longer than to the other peripheral location, which was inhibition of return. This indicates that Grade 2 was not sensitive to cue validity,so they did not make use of predictability of cues to voluntarily adjust exogenous orienting triggered by cuing.Secondly, When Stimulus Onset Asynchrony is 550ms,750ms,950ms separately, inhibitions of return of Gade 4 of primary school and Grade 1 of the junior high school is different under three different cue validities.When SOA is 550ms and is 750ms, Gade 4 of primary school and Grade 1 of the junior high school did not show inhibition of return under the conditions of high and low cue validities.It indicated that these participants' attention were not attracted by central cuing,but remained on peripheral cuing location.So it is clear that these participants realized the predictability of cuing and then strategicly adjust exogenous attention orienting.Contrast to Grade 2,the endogenous attention of Grade 4 and Grade 1 of junior high school is substantially improved,and influenced inhibition of return greatly.The development from Grade 4 to Grade 1 of junior high school is not remarkable.When SOA is 950ms, inhibition of return of Grade 4 and Grade 1 of junior high school differentiates,indicating that with SOA becoming longer,their strategies seems different.The strategy of Grade 1 of junior high school seems conservative when SOA is 950ms and cue validity is much high.3,Contrast to the detective task, the effects of cue validity in the discrimination task is not clear.Maybe,because the discrimination task is more difficult,and needs more cognitive competences and working memory,the machanism of inhibition of return did not show the regular change.