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Schooling may shape children's abilities to control their attention, but it is unclear if this impact extends from control over visual objects to encompass multisensory objects, which are more typical of everyday environments. We compared children across three primary school grades (Swiss first, third, and fifth grades) on their performance on a game-like audiovisual attentional control task, while recording their electroencephalogram (EEG). Behavioral markers of "visual" attentional control were present from third grade (after 2 years of schooling), whereas multisensory attentional control was not detected in any group. However, multivariate whole-brain EEG analyses ("electrical neuroimaging") revealed stable patterns of brain activity that indexed both types of attentional control--visual control in all age groups, and multisensory attentional control from third grade onward. Multivariate EEG approaches can uncover otherwise undetectable mechanisms of attentional control over visual and multisensory objects, and characterize how these mechanisms differ across educational stages.

The current paper presents an overview of the workflow of the Working Memory, Cognition and Development (WomCogDev) lab at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, as an example of how Open Science principles can be applied in a developmental psychology lab. We describe the importance and challenges of applying Open Science practices in developmental research and detail each step of our workflow from research design to dissemination. We provide examples and give emphasis to steps that typically receive little attention but that may hold promise for application in other labs (namely, project design, data collection and data analysis). Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our workflow and summarize the main takeaways for other labs. By 'opening up' our lab's workflow, we want to encourage other labs to incorporate the aspects that they like into their own workflows and to share their own processes for the continued benefit of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]