The development of attentional resolution

• The spatial resolution of attention changes across childhood and adolescence.
• Attentional resolution shows a marked increase between 7 and 9 years of age.
• The resolution of attention is still immature at 13 years of age.

Attentional resolution (He & Cavanagh, 1996) is defined as the smallest region in space that can be selected by visual attention. We investigated the development of attentional resolution of 7-, 9-, 11- and 13-year-olds and adults. We used a tracking paradigm with one target and varied the distance between target and distractors. Our results demonstrate that the resolution of attention develops markedly between childhood and adulthood. The developmental trajectory is characterized by a strong increase in attentional resolution between 7 and 9 years of age and a plateau at still immature performance between 11 and 13 years. The observed development of attentional resolution may be caused by the maturation of the neural networks responsible for the top-down deployment of visuo-spatial attention. Implications for reading acquisition are discussed.