Research On Multidimensional Characteristics And Internal Relationships Of Attention Development In Primary School Children

Attention is the portal and core component of mental activities,which is closely related to learning efficiency.Most children with learning difficulties have attention problems,while the attention problems of primary school children mainly come from the insufficiency of basic attention function and sustained attention.Therefore,an accurate measure of the levels of basic attention function and sustained attention of primary school children is very important to the solution to children’s learning difficulties.However,previous attention measurements face a serious reproducibility crisis.Low reliability in attention measurement makes it difficult for people to reach a consensus on the trajectory of children’s attention development.In this thesis,the developmental trajectory of basic attention function and sustained attention of primary school children was investigated by using high reliability measurement paradigms.The internal relationships among attentional components were further examined.In the first study of this thesis,277 primary school children aged 6-13 years were enrolled in the high reliability composite attention test（HR-CAT）to characterize the developmental trajectory of basic attentional function and collaboration relationships among attentional components.Considering the speed-accuracy tradeoff,this study used the balanced integration score（BIS）to integrate response time and accuracy,then conducted a regression analysis between BIS and age.The results showed that the splithalf reliabilities of all indexes were greater than 0.74.The development of executive control followed a quadratic curve and reached its peak at 10 years old.Alerting and orientation did not develop significantly.The collaboration between executive control and orientation increased linearly with age.In addition,the effect of executive control on orientation and alerting and the effect of executive control-orientation collaboration on alerting increased linearly with age.These highly reliable measurements indicated that executive control played a leading role in the development of basic attention function in primary school children,supporting previous findings that executive control continued to develop in primary school while alerting and orientation no longer developed.The second study described the development characteristics of sustained attention in 264 primary school children aged 6-13 years by using the gradual onset continuous performance task（grad CPT）which has been demonstrated to be highly reliable.The split-half reliabilities of response time,commission error,omission error,and the discrimination index（d’）ranged from 0.66 to 0.99.Regression analyses between these indices and age showed that the discrimination ability increased linearly with age,while inhibition failure（commission error）and attentional deficit（omission error）decreased linearly with age.Correlation analyses between the power of reaction time in each frequency point and age showed that the fluctuation of reaction time decreases with age in almost all frequency bands,indicating that the stability of sustained attention increases with age.This study further explored the internal relationships between components of basic attentional function and sustained attention,and found that executive control and inter-component collaboration could significantly predict the development of sustained attention,indicating that the development of basic attentional function supports the development of sustained attention,a complex attentional function.In conclusion,this study revealed the nonlinear development trend of executive control in primary school children and the linear development trend of executive control centered collaboration between basic attentional functions for the first time with highly reliable results.The development of sustained attention was also linear and it was influenced by the development of executive control.These findings indicate that different components of attention have different developmental trajectories and they delineate for the first time the internal relationships between different components of attention during development in primary school children.