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The manner by which developing children resist interference effects from irrelevant information is examined. Of particular significance are the influence of perceived structure and selective attention on interference. Stimulus response translation is emphasized over perceptual filtering and motor preparation processes in decreasing interference effects in developing children.

Children respond faster and are less susceptible to interference from task-irrelevant information as they grow older, suggesting that a global mechanism may be responsible for developmental change in speed of responding. The performance of four age groups on a range of six speeded performance tasks was examined and the results support a hypothesis of generalized developmental changes in response activation, although a less obvious development of inhibition.

Abstract: Dual tasks and their associated delays have often been used to examine the boundaries of processing in the brain. We used the dual-task procedure and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how mental rotation of a first stimulus (S1) influences the shifting of visual-spatial attention to a second stimulus (S2). Visual-spatial attention was monitored by using the N2pc component of the ERP. In addition, we examined the sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) believed to index the retention of information in visual short-term memory. We found modulations of both the N2pc and the SPCN, suggesting that engaging mechanisms of mental rotation impairs the deployment of visual-spatial attention and delays the passage of a representation of S2 into visual short-term memory. Both results suggest interactions between mental rotation and visual-spatial attention in capacity-limited processing mechanisms indicating that response selection is not pivotal in dual-task delays and all three processes are likely to share a common resource like executive control. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]