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Children's perseveration: attentional inertia and alternative accounts

Children's perseveration: attentional inertia and alternative accounts Kirkham, Cruess and Diamond report important findings on children's ability to switch to a new dimension in a card sorting task: When asked to label a relevant feature, 3‐year‐olds are more likely to switch to the new dimension, and when previously sorted cards are left face‐up, 4‐year‐olds are less likely to switch to a new dimension. These are clever manipulations and interesting results. They contribute to a growing body of data on children's perseveration, which should inform and constrain a variety of theories of the development of flexible behavior. The theoretical contributions from the paper are less clear, for two reasons. As elaborated below: (1) the proposed account has strengths, but in its current form comes across as somewhat inconsistent, underspecified and circular, and (2) alternative accounts are discounted too readily. Attentional inertia: consistency, specificity, circularity The proposed account of children's perseveration focuses on the role of ‘attentional inertia’– the difficulty redirecting attention once it is focused on a particular dimension. There is something that feels quite right about this term. Children (and adults) do get stuck in what they attend to and have difficulty overcoming this. However, it is not clear how the proposed account goes beyond http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Developmental Science Wiley

Children's perseveration: attentional inertia and alternative accounts

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References (15)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company
ISSN
1363-755X
eISSN
1467-7687
DOI
10.1111/1467-7687.00302
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Kirkham, Cruess and Diamond report important findings on children's ability to switch to a new dimension in a card sorting task: When asked to label a relevant feature, 3‐year‐olds are more likely to switch to the new dimension, and when previously sorted cards are left face‐up, 4‐year‐olds are less likely to switch to a new dimension. These are clever manipulations and interesting results. They contribute to a growing body of data on children's perseveration, which should inform and constrain a variety of theories of the development of flexible behavior. The theoretical contributions from the paper are less clear, for two reasons. As elaborated below: (1) the proposed account has strengths, but in its current form comes across as somewhat inconsistent, underspecified and circular, and (2) alternative accounts are discounted too readily. Attentional inertia: consistency, specificity, circularity The proposed account of children's perseveration focuses on the role of ‘attentional inertia’– the difficulty redirecting attention once it is focused on a particular dimension. There is something that feels quite right about this term. Children (and adults) do get stuck in what they attend to and have difficulty overcoming this. However, it is not clear how the proposed account goes beyond

Journal

Developmental ScienceWiley

Published: Nov 1, 2003

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