The development of attentional control mechanisms in multisensory environments

Outside the laboratory, people need to pay attention to relevant objects that are typically multisensory, but it remains poorly understood how the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms develop. We investigated when adult-like mechanisms controlling ones attentional selection of visual and multisensory objects emerge across childhood. Five-, 7-, and 9-year-olds were compared with adults in their performance on a computer game-like multisensory spatial cueing task, while 129-channel EEG was simultaneously recorded. Markers of attentional control were behavioural spatial cueing effects and the N2pc ERP component (analysed traditionally and using a multivariate electrical neuroimaging framework). In behaviour, adult-like visual attentional control was present from age 7 onwards, whereas multisensory control was absent in all children groups. In EEG, multivariate analyses of the activity over the N2pc time-window revealed stable brain activity patterns in children. Adult-like visual-attentional control EEG patterns were present age 7 onwards, while multisensory control activity patterns were found in 9-year-olds (albeit behavioural measures showed no effects). By combining rigorous yet naturalistic paradigms with multivariate signal analyses, we demonstrated that visual attentional control seems to reach an adult-like state at ~7 years, before adult-like multisensory control, emerging at ~9 years. These results enrich our understanding of how attention in naturalistic settings develops. HighlightsO_LIBy age 7, children showed adult-like task-set contingent attentional capture in behaviour C_LIO_LIChildrens behavioural data did not show evidence for attentional enhancement for multisensory objects, but 9-year-olds EEG topographic patterns elicited by multisensory vs. purely visual distractors differed reliably C_LIO_LITraditional visual attentional event-related potential (ERP) analyses, such as the N2pc, did not detect attentional enhancement for multisensory objects in adults, and visual or multisensory attention in children C_LIO_LIMultivariate analyses of ERPs, such as electrical neuroimaging, are more sensitive to the change of attentional control processes over development C_LI