1. Attention becomes more exploratory and less captive. In the early days following birth, the child's attention seems to be reflexively "captured" by such environmental information as movement of objects, complex informational displays, sounds. Later, the child becomes apt at actively exploring visual or acoustic displays. We assume that active scanning of an environmental display occurs only after the infant is sufficiently skilled in constructing and storing internal representations in STM so that he can make use of the sequential input of information and still maintain a sense of continuity, rather than experiencing a kaleidoscopic experience of successive internal representations. Presumably, then, only after sensori-motor intelligence has sufficiently progressed to build and store internal schemata in LTM for use in organizing successive inputs does the attention "break loose" from the perceptual resonance due to the inherited capacity for hearing and seeing, and begin to operate in service to the newly formed sensori-motor schemata. Fantz (1970) has indicated that the child may begin to "look" and "listen" as early as three weeks. Also, it has been suggested (Kagan, 1970) that such infants can construct mental representations of events. This implies that they are capable of establishing cognitive structures and processing information. Such a behavioral alteration, a progression from the passive registration of information in displays to the active pursuing and processing of information, is the principal consideration responsible for the present model's differentiation between seeing and looking, and hearing and listening.
  2. Exploratory attentive search becomes more systematic and less random. Investigations of the visual search patterns of children (Vurpillot, 1968; Mackworth and Bruner, 1970) have revealed that the course of eye movements and construction of search strategies change with age. Young children (three-year-olds) tend to fixate a segment of a display for a relatively long time, suggesting that it takes them longer to extract the information for building an internal representation (Mackworth and Bruner, 1970). The pattern of fixations of the young child is not as oriented toward informative areas of display as is the older child's (6 years old) and adult's, nor do they show the use of efficient scanning patterns for various tasks. In part, this may reflect the young child's lack of ability to simultaneously process information from the fovea and the periphery of the eye (Gibson and Olum, 1960). Atkin (1969), using an ocular pursuit task, determined that adults had developed their visual inspection mechanisms to the extent that they could simultaneously process both peripheral and foveal information. This is an especially important skill vis-a-vis reading which we will discuss later on.
  3. Attention becomes more selective and exclusive. As children develop, they become better at selecting what they will attend to. They are able to "focus" attention or "concentrate" on task-relevant information. Importantly, this ability requires that the child establish some cognitive goal, and then seek information which will achieve that goal. Selective attending is very much a problem- solving type of activity, in which external information that satisfies some cognitive requirement is sought. To selectively attend, the child has to know what type of information is needed to solve the cognitive problem. Thus, if the child is at a party and wants to selectively listen to one voice out of the clamor of a dozen voices, he or she must extract information from SIS which will contribute to the construction of a particular conceptualization, via languaging. To facilitate the extraction of this information, the child may perform an orienting movement, such as turning the head toward the speaker, which will have the effect of amplifying the particular signal over others in the SIS. Additionally, the child may make use of binaural localizations to guide the selection of the desired information from SIS. The use of orienting responses and binaural localization appear as basic abilities even in neonates (E. Gibson, 1969, p. 460), while the ability to selectively extract meaningful information obviously depends upon the child's acquisition of a conceptual base and the ability to language.