Attention in Adults vs Children

      On the 25th of January, Yael Granot presented her work in research regarding the topic of perception vs reality when viewing video evidence. She explains how visual information is trusted more than other sensory modalities when viewing video evidence in court. However, she does argue that this information is based on the underlying assumption that everyone sees the same thing when viewing a video. She discusses that we can't make this assumption because our foveal region is very small and our environments are very complex. She focused on 152 NYU  undergraduate students and showed each student a dashcam video of a police-civilian altercation while tracking their eye movements to determine the location of focus for each participant. The results of this study indicate that people who identify more with police and focus more on the police officer tended to give the police less punishment with increasing fixations whereas people who have a weak identification with the police and focus more on the police officer tend to give the police more punishment.
      After reflecting upon this specific study out of the many that Yael and her colleagues conducted, I was interested in learning if this trend is also present in kids. Is the limited attention in adults also present in kids? According to the article "Children Notice Information that Adults Miss" published in Psychological Science, a study was conducted measuring the attention of adults compared to children. The study consisted of 35 adults and 34 children who were presented with two shapes (one red and one green) and were asked to focus on the red shape. Shortly after they were presented with two more shapes and they had to states if the shapes on the new screen were the same or different.
     The results of this experiment indicated that children were much better at indicating whether the non-focused shape changed while adults were better at indicating whether the focused shape changed. This indicates that children are sometimes able to see the information that is not seen by adults because children tend to distribute their attention widely on the entire stimulus present while adults had focused attention only on the stimulus that they were asked to focus on. I find this data extremely interesting and ironic because usually the inability for children to focus their attention is seen as a negative quality when in fact it can be useful, especially when viewing video evidence in court.



Children Notice Information That Adults Miss

Children Notice Information That Adults Miss. (2017, April 10). Retrieved February 25, 2020, from       https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/children-pay-attention-to-information-                 a.dults-miss.html

In the Eyes of the Law: Perception Versus Reality in Appraisals of Video Evidence

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hdluh1vfs2cphhz/AACqNFxKZ0QYojYVsPg3HafLa/(02.25.20)%20-%20Yael%20Granot?dl=0&subfolder_nav_tracking=1