Attention is limited in terms of both capacity (i.e., amount of information attended) and selectivity (i.e., the degree to which non-attended information is nonetheless processed). One of the seminal theories in the field, load theory, predicts that these two aspects of attention interact in systematic ways. Specifically, load theory predicts that when the amount of information to attend is less than the available capacity, spare attention will naturally leak out to unattended items. While load theory has found a great deal of empirical support, the robustness of the findings has recently been called into question, in particular with respect to the extent to which the predictions are borne out across different tasks and populations. Here we report tests of perceptual load effects in two different tasks (change detection and enumeration) and in two populations (adults and 7- to 8-year-old children). Adults’ accuracies did not demonstrate the predicted interaction between the capacity and selection dimensions, whereas children’s performance, in addition to being overall worse than adults, did show the interaction. The overall lower accuracy of children was seen to be the result of a larger performance decrement in response to capacity demands, distracting information, and their interaction. Interestingly, while these results were seen at the level of the two tasks, there was no within-participants correlation across tasks. Overall, these results suggest that maturation-related changes attenuate the magnitude of distractor effects in attention, which in turn limits the evidence for interactions between capacity and selection in high-functioning populations.

中文翻译：

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注意负荷效应：比较任务和年龄组。

注意力在容量（即参与的信息量）和选择性（即未参与信息的处理程度）方面都是有限的。该领域的开创性理论之一，负荷理论，预测注意力的这两个方面以系统的方式相互作用。具体来说，负载理论预测，当要参与的信息量小于可用容量时，多余的注意力自然会泄漏到无人参与的项目上。虽然负载理论已经找到了大量的实证支持，但最近发现的稳健性受到质疑，特别是在预测在不同任务和人群中得到证实的程度方面。在这里，我们报告了在两个不同任务（变化检测和枚举）和两个群体（成人和 7 至 8 岁儿童）中感知负荷效应的测试。成人的准确度并没有显示出能力和选择维度之间预测的相互作用，而儿童的表现，除了总体上比成人差之外，确实显示了相互作用。儿童的整体准确性较低被认为是响应能力需求、分散注意力的信息和他们的互动而导致更大的表现下降的结果。有趣的是，虽然这些结果是在两个任务的级别上看到的，但在不同任务之间没有参与者内部相关性。总体而言，这些结果表明与成熟相关的变化减弱了注意力分散效应的程度，