Focusing on visual attention

✍ Scribed by Richards, John E.

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Weight: 115 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1057-3593
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0917(199809)7:3<153::aid-edp178>3.0.co;2-g

✦ Synopsis

There is much to praise in this book. The combination of a detailed literature review for the many areas of cognitive development (attention, memory, language) impinged upon by brain development, and a perspective emphasising the integration of brain development, cognitive development, and cognitive neuroscience, is admirable. This book is extremely valuable as a review of this emerging area. It sets the conditions for what developmental cognitive neuroscience is, and defines many of the topic areas for this research paradigm. It would be extremely useful as a primary or secondary reader for advanced college courses in developmental psychology.

The focus of this paper will be on the discussion in Chapter 3 concerning 'Visual Orienting' (3.2) and 'Visual Attention' (3.3). There are roughly four topics presented in these two sections. First (section 3.2), there is a review of the Bronson (1974) and the Johnson (1990, 1995a), Johnson et al. (1991) models of the development of eye movement systems. Johnson's model posits that developmental changes in the functioning of the layers of the primary visual cortex (V1), and its afferent and efferent pathways, is responsible for behavioural changes found in visual orienting tasks. Second, three marker tasks used by the author (Johnson, 1995b) and in collaboration with Rick Gilmore (Gilmore, 1997;Gilmore and Johnson, 1995, 1997) are reviewed. These marker tasks include an anti-saccade task thought to be based on frontal eye field functioning, an oculomotor delayed re-