This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate developmental changes in the efficiency of sustained, selective, and divided attention in a group of children aged 6−12 years by means of a computerized test battery. Participants included 199 children (51% female, majority White) who had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no history of either neurological or attention deficit disorders. The study was conducted in three different schools. We used a convenience sampling strategy; each age group was sampled from one of the schools and was represented by students selected from different (parallel) classes of the same grade level. The three aspects of attention showed different developmental trajectories from 6 to 12 years. In terms of accuracy, selective attention was found to improve gradually, while the efficiency of divided attention increased dramatically across the school-age years. In terms of reaction time, all attentional components showed a slow developmental time course. The results indicate that situations in which children have to divide attention among several sources of visual information while looking for two target stimuli considerably hamper their task performance. This is especially true for children of senior preschool and primary school age.

中文翻译：

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学龄儿童持续、选择性和分散注意力的发展

这项横断面研究旨在通过计算机测试电池来调查一组 6-12 岁儿童持续、选择性和分散注意力效率的发展变化。参与者包括 199 名儿童（51% 是女性，大多数是白人），他们视力正常或矫正至正常，并且没有神经系统或注意力缺陷障碍病史。这项研究是在三所不同的学校进行的。我们使用了方便抽样策略；每个年龄组都是从其中一所学校中抽取的，并由从同一年级的不同（平行）班级中选出的学生代表。注意力的三个方面在6至12年间呈现出不同的发展轨迹。就准确性而言，选择性注意力逐渐提高，而分散注意力的效率在整个学龄期显着提高。就反应时间而言，所有注意力成分都表现出缓慢的发展时间过程。结果表明，儿童在寻找两个目标刺激时必须将注意力分散到多个视觉信息源的情况会极大地妨碍他们的任务表现。对于学龄前和小学高年级的儿童来说尤其如此。