Visual attention in a visual-haptic, cross-modal matching task in children and adults.

Visual fixation patterns were analyzed to gain insight into developmental changes in attention allocation in a cross-modal task. Two patterns that have been associated with increased task difficulty, gaze aversion and fixation duration, were recorded using an eye-tracker. In this exploratory study, 37 elementary age children (M age 7-10 yr.) and 23 undergraduates engaged in visual-only and haptic-visual shape-matching tasks. Theoretical assumptions underlying this study are that children have greater limitations on attention capacity compared to adults, and that a task presented in the cross-modal condition would pose special demands on this capacity. A 2×2 (uni- or cross-modal×age group) repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze both gaze aversion and average fixation duration. Children averted gaze significantly more during the cross-modal condition, supporting the idea that children use gaze aversion as an attention-shifting mechanism. Mean fixation duration increased for both groups in the cross-modal condition. Due to the small number and limited age range of the children as well as the limited number of task items, interpretations are made with caution.