Development of foveal and peripheral selection if pre-adolescents (7-14 years old)

Abstract

A lot of the current literature about visual search for individuals is focused on either children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or adults. There are no studies focusing the underlying processes of visual search by children with typical development. In this study, we conducted an eye-tracking task on pre-adolescents (age 7-14) to measure how foveal processing and peripheral information selection develops over age. Participants had to find a target among distractors with similar features and less similar features. When the spatial frequency and the orientation of the elements were more similar to the target, an increase in processing time was reported. Moreover, a negative relation indicated that the processing time of these elements decreases between the age of seven and fourteen. Furthermore, participants used the spatial frequency as well as the orientation of elements for selection of the next element to process. At last, no relation was found between the use of spatial frequency and orientation for selection of the next target and the age of seven to fourteen.