Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One challenge in studying cognition over the lifespan is designing tasks that measure the same construct in dif-ferent age groups and relate reliably to real-world outcomes. The current study confronts this challenge by testing a newparadigm to assess attention in preschool-aged children for comparison with other measures. Children completed the new“Pop-the-Bubbles” paradigm plus Flanker and Visual Search tasks, for comparison with parental reports of behavioral regula-tion. Correlations between behavioral regulation and measures from both Flanker and Pop-the-Bubbles suggest that children’sability to ignore irrelevant stimuli in these lab tasks relates to their ability to behave appropriately in everyday situations. Fur-ther development of Pop-the-Bubbles for eye-tracking and a color version of Flanker are underway to test these relationshipsmore extensively in young children.