Cultivating the toddler data desert with the Visual Attention Processing Protocol (VAPP): A novel scalable measure of individual differences in attentional processing from 2 to 6 years old

The current study proposes the Visual Attention Processing Protocol (VAPP), as a solution to the transferability of methods and scalability of singular attention tasks from toddlerhood to middle childhood. The VAPP was administered to 122 children ages 2- to 6-years-old. Consistent with our hypothesis, this task captured differences specific to orienting, alerting, and executive attention abilities across this age range. Furthermore, orienting was shown to have the least difference across age suggesting it is largely already developed by toddlerhood. The executive function block had the greatest changes among all tasks, indicating that it was the skill least developed at toddlerhood but the one with the most robust developmental gains by middle childhood. There were also developmental shifts in how well children regulate attentional control in the face of conflicting information across age groups—with results indicating that an added tone facilitated a faster response time in older children but interfered with accuracy in younger children. In addition, within- and between-group differences demonstrated the nuances of attentional abilities via error making as it relates to broader cognitive processes such as conflict resolution (e.g., specific to rule use), language (i.e., categorical sorting of items), and selective attention (i.e., direction of an object rather than the spatial location of an object). Together, results indicate a single paradigm can be sensitive to developmental gains in visual attention processing associated with efficiency and speed of responding from toddlerhood to middle childhood. Future directions and implications for clinical use are discussed.