One of the lawlike regularities of psychological science is that of developmental progression—an increase in sensorimotor, cognitive, and social functioning from childhood to adulthood. Here, we report a rare violation of this law, a developmental reversal in attention. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds (n = 34) and adults (n = 35) performed a change-detection task that included externally cued and uncued shapes. Whereas the adults outperformed the children on the cued shapes, the children outperformed the adults on the uncued shapes. In Experiment 2, the same participants completed a visual search task, and their memory for search-relevant and search-irrelevant information was tested. The young children outperformed the adults with respect to search-irrelevant features. This demonstration of a paradoxical property of early attention deepens current understanding of the development of attention. It also has implications for understanding early learning and cognitive development more broadly.

中文翻译：

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选择性注意的成本：当孩子注意到大人错过了什么

心理科学的规律之一是发展进程——从童年到成年的感觉运动、认知和社会功能的增加。在这里，我们报告了罕见的违反该定律的行为，即注意力的发展逆转。在实验 1 中，4 到 5 岁的儿童（n = 34）和成年人（n = 35）执行了一项变化检测任务，其中包括外部提示和未提示的形状。成人在提示形状上的表现优于儿童，而儿童在未提示形状上的表现优于成人。在实验 2 中，相同的参与者完成了视觉搜索任务，并测试了他们对搜索相关和搜索无关信息的记忆。在与搜索无关的特征方面，幼儿的表现优于成年人。这种早期注意力的矛盾性质的证明加深了当前对注意力发展的理解。它还对更广泛地理解早期学习和认知发展有影响。