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The role of attention in shaping neural entrainment across development

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Elena Greatti^1,2 (egreatti@sissa.it), Levi Antle³, Elaine Guan³, Maria Romero Ochoa³, Davide Crepaldi^1,4, Amy Finn³; ¹International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), ²University of Camerino, ³University of Toronto, ⁴University of Pavia

While adults excel at filtering sensory input to prioritize task-relevant goals, children are characterized by more distributed attentional deployment. This broader attentional focus, often framed as a cognitive limitation, may facilitate learning by allowing incidental processing of background information. Here, we hypothesized that children’s visual statistical learning, the extraction of regularities from the environment, would be relatively resilient to attentional diversion compared to adults. We recorded EEG from 116 participants (56 children and 60 adults) as they viewed a continuous 8-minute stream of animal images presented in triplets. Across conditions, the visual input was identical; attention was manipulated by requiring participants either to attend to the animal stream (full-attention condition) or to perform a demanding 1-back task on overlaid shapes (diverted-attention condition). Neural entrainment at the triplet rate indexed online sensitivity to statistical structure, while target detection and familiarity judgment tasks assessed indirect and direct expressions of learning after exposure. Neural entrainment at the image rate, reflecting low-level sensory tracking, showed a condition × group interaction: adults exhibited no reliable modulation by attention, whereas children showed stronger sensory tracking under diversion. By contrast, neural entrainment at the triplet rate showed no condition × group interaction, although follow-up analyses indicated attenuation under attentional diversion in adults but not in children. Together, these findings indicate that attentional diversion differentially modulates low-level sensory tracking across development, but not necessarily higher-level tracking of embedded statistical regularities; within-group patterns nonetheless suggest the need for follow-up on a possible reduced effect of attentional diversion in children.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Development & aging