User:Mwaryas/Selective auditory attention

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Development in Youth

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Selective auditory attention is a component of auditory attention, which also includes arousal, orienting response, and attention span. Examining selective auditory attention has been known to be easier in children and adults compared to infants due to the limited ability to use and understand verbal commands. As a result, most of the understanding of auditory selection in infants is derived from other research, such as speech and language perception and discrimination. However, small amounts of selection in infants have been recorded with preference over an infant's mother's voice compared to another female, one's native language over a foreign one, and speech directed towards infants instead of speech in between adults.

As through age, older children have an increased ability to detect and select auditory stimuli compared to their younger counterparts. This suggests that selective auditory attention is an age dependent ability that increases based on improvements in automatic processing of information.

As children of lower ages demonstrate a lesser ability to detect and select auditory stimuli compared to their older counterparts, the ability to discriminate irrelevant information from relevant has shown to be lower in those of younger ages than in older ages. The ability to allocate attention to one message among interfering messages increases with age, particularly between the ages 5 through 12 and eventually evening out after that.

Factors that have shown to contribute to these heightened abilities include increased language ability and word familiarity as age increases.

Another factor could be that older children are more equipped to understand a task and the reward and/or punishment for being able to understand and complete a task, thus eliminate unnecessary stimuli more frequently. Using the incidental learning paradigm, it was measured that children ages 11 and up begin to be less likely to process incidental stimuli due to the development of strategies to actively process relevant information over irrelevant.

All in all, the inability to filter out irrelevant information and/or allocate attention to relevant information leads back to developmentally immature attention allocation.