The development of attention and distractibility in preschool children from higher and lower socioeconomic status backgrounds

Attention is a multifaceted construct supported by multiple brain networks that undergo significant development in childhood. In children, select relevant information and suppress distracting information are critical skills for school success. However, the developmental trajectory of these attentional abilities, and how external factors such as socioeconomic status (SES) influence them, has not been adequately characterized. We used the Competitive Attention Task (CAT) to simultaneously measure voluntary attention, distraction, phasic arousal, impulsivity and motor control in 4- and 5-year-old children from higher and lower SES backgrounds (N=72). Irrespective of age and SES, distracting sounds induce distraction and facilitation effects, as well as increased impulsivity, which is developmentally consistent with previous studies in older children and adults (Hoyer et. al., 2021). However, 4-year-old children from lower SES backgrounds presented significantly higher variability in response times, made more impulsive responses, and missed more targets than the higher SES group. These results indicate that multiple facets of attention contribute to distractibility in young children, and may inform evidence-based programs to compensate for attention differences in childhood.