Sustained Selective Attention in Adolescence: Cognitive Development and Predictors of Distractibility at School

Despite much research into the development of attention in adolescence, mixed results and between-task differences have precluded clear conclusions regarding the relative early- or late- maturation of attention abilities. Moreover, although adolescents constantly face the need to pay attention to their lessons at school it remains unclear whether laboratory measures of attention can predict their ability to sustain attention focus during school lessons. Here we therefore devised a task that was sensitive to measure both sustained and selective attention, and tested the applicability of our measures to the adolescents levels of inattention during their school lessons. 166 adolescents (aged 12-17) and 50 adults performed in our sustained-selective attention task, searching for letter targets, while ignoring salient yet-entirely-irrelevant distractor faces, under different levels of perceptual load- an established determinant of attention in adults. Inattention levels during a just-preceding classroom lesson were measured using our novel self-report classroom-distractibility checklist. The results established that while distractor interference, and its modulation by perceptual load, did not differ from adults, sustained attention measures of response variability continued to develop into adulthood, a developmental trajectory which persisted across perceptual load levels. Both distractor interference and response variability were significant unique predictors of distractibility in the classroom, including when interest in the lesson and cognitive aptitude were controlled for. Overall, the results demonstrate divergence of development of sustained and selective attention in adolescence, and establish both as significant predictors of attention in the important educational setting of school lessons.