The Mirror of ERISED

"Sustained attention and social competence in typically developing preschool-aged children."
Bennett-Murphy, Laurie-Rose, Brinkman, & McNamara (2007)

I actually found this article by researching for a paper for a different class. I spent time with preschool children this semester through an internship, and for my final paper further explored the development of social competence during preschool. I came across this correlation study that was interested in whether children who had better sustained attention were more socially competent because they could attend to verbal and non-verbal cues during interaction with their peers. Bennett Murphy, Laurie-Rose, Brinkman, and McNamara (2007) used a five minute computerized visual vigilance task to measure sustained attention adapted for preschool children. The participants were forty preschool children, twenty boys and twenty girls ages 3-5 years. The vigilance task asked participants to hit the spacebar when they saw a target picture of a bird appear on the screen. Neutral stimuli were also presented, so children were asked to discriminate between the target symbol and the neutral stimuli. After the task was completed, the researchers assessed social competence by means of behavioral observation during free play according to the Howes Peer Play Scale. This scale assessed overall peer competence, gregariousness, and aggression. They also observed and evaluated object competence by assessing the use of toys during play (correct or incorrect: banging a toy truck against the ground vs. moving it along the floor). Results indicated that the more correct detections the child made during the vigilance task, the more likely he or she was to engage in social or reciprocal play; those who made the more errors of commission displayed more aggressive behavior. The results also indicated that children who were better able to detect changes in stimuli were more gregarious. Overall, the results suggested that the constructs assessed by the Howes Peer Play Scale were correlated to better performance on the computerized vigilance task that tested sustained attention.

This study has implications for my own study because it described and used an measure of sustained attention and it was successfully administered to preschool children. It also has implications for the real life application of my study, because I am trying to explore a means of increasing the sustained attention of preschool children, which this study suggests is correlated with social competence of children this age. If sessions of yoga can improve the sustained attention of preschool children, it could be suggested that children engage in yoga before free play because this could improve their social competence. The results of this study also suggest that children who made more errors of commission were more aggressive during social interactions, so perhaps if yoga is associated with a decrease in errors of commission on a vigilance task, children might be less likely to be aggressive during free play after a session of yoga. This study also extensively researched sustained attention, so it provided sources for me to explore in my own study about sustained attention of preschool children.

This article can be accessed through the PsycINFO database.