Analysis of omission and commission errors in a visual search task by school-age children (Análisis de errores de omisión y comisión en una tarea de búsqueda visual en niños de edad escolar)

ABSTRACT Visual search is an attentional process that requires the subject to search for a target among distractors. Failures in this process are associated with a variety of difficulties that manifest in different stages of development. They are often assessed using Conjunction Visual Search tasks. Despite this, few studies have analysed the errors committed in these tasks during development in detail. The purpose of this study is to analyse the types of errors associated with developmental changes in school-age children. Our hypotheses are that younger children would present more errors than older ones; there would be more omission errors than commission errors; younger children would commit more omission errors than older ones; and omission errors would increase as the number of distractors increased. The study results have shown that errors tend to decrease throughout development. Specifically, commission errors remain stable according to the number of distractors and task complexity, while omission errors increase according to these variables. These results provide evidence indicating that error types are based on different cognitive processes.