NEURAL ACTIVATION DURING DIMENSIONAL LABEL LEARNING PREDICTS DIMENSONAL ATTENTION

Previous research suggests that children’s ability to label visual features (e.g., “red”) and dimensions (e.g., “color”) can change aspects of their attention to visual dimensions (Buss & Kerr-German, 2019). Based on this research, the goal of this study is to investigate whether children’s dimensional attention can be predicted by the neural dynamics of dimensional label learning (DLL). We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure hemodynamic changes in left frontal, left parietal and left temporal cortices previously implicated in dimensional attention (Morton et al., 2009; Buss & Spencer, 2018) while participants completed a battery of dimensional label learning and dimensional attention tasks. Dimensional attention was measured using the dimensional change card sort task (DCCS) which measures explicit flexible dimensional attention, a dimensional attention priming task which measures implicit attentional stability, a matching task which measures selective attention and property-property mapping, and the triad classification (TC) task which measures children’s implicit selective attention. It was found that the temporal cortex was activated during the DLL tasks. Further, it was found that successful performance on the dimensional attention tasks was associated with activation in the parietal cortex for the DLL tasks. On the other hand, low performance on the dimensional attention task was marked with activation in the temporal cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex for the DLL tasks.