Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to sustain attention on a target in the presence of distractors is critical for learning and development. Recentwork has suggested that labeling a target object facilitates childrens performance in tasks requiring attentional selection,with a proposed mechanism relying on the enhancement of the target representation in working memory. In this pre-registered study, we tested this hypothesis by examining the effect of label familiarity on sustained attention. If labelsinfluence how strongly targets are represented in working memory, then more familiar labels should show a larger benefitrelative to less familiar labels. We discuss the results in the context of theories of language and cognition, and theircontribution to understanding the mechanisms supporting the development of selective sustained attention.