Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Erikson flanker task is a well-established measure of selective attention for adults. In this task, participants judgethe direction a central target points with flanking distractors that are neutral (no direction), congruent (same direction astarget), or incongruent (opposite direction of target). This task has recently been modified for use with young children,but it is unclear whether developmental differences in childrens spatial skills and language limit its appropriateness. Thecurrent study tested preschool-aged children in both the classic directional version and new color version (i.e., blue and redtargets, with blue, red, or white flankers). Results showed significantly better performance on the color versus directionalversion, with trial types showing the same pattern in both tasks: worst performance on incongruent trials, comparableperformance on congruent and neutral. Ongoing work is comparing the same tasks in adults to see if this difference islimited to early childhood.