Age and Hearing Ability Influence Selective Attention During Childhood.
Kristina M Ward, Tina M Grieco-Calub
PMID 34999592WHAT IT FOUND
Children with hearing loss showed poorer selective attention than peers with normal hearing in both auditory and visual tasks.
Attention improved with age for all children. The hearing loss effect was stronger in auditory tasks but persisted in visual ones, suggesting attentional difficulties extend beyond hearing.
Key findings
01Children with hearing loss had lower response sensitivity and poorer selective attention than children with normal hearing across both auditory and visual tasks.
02Selective attention improved with age for both groups, with older children responding more accurately and with fewer false alarms.
03The difference in attention between children with and without hearing loss was greater in the auditory modality than in the visual modality.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample size for children with hearing loss was small (16) compared to children with normal hearing (61), which limited the ability to examine specific subgroups or relations within the hearing loss group. There was considerable variability in the hearing loss group regarding etiology, onset, type, degree of loss, and device usage, which could not be fully accounted for in the analysis. The auditory and visual tasks were not perfectly matched in difficulty or perceptual salience, which may have influenced the differences in performance between modalities. The study did not measure language ability, which is known to interact with executive function and could have contributed to the observed attentional differences. The cross-sectional design means the study cannot track how individual children's attention changes over time.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that visual attention deficits in children with hearing loss are secondary to auditory deprivation alone. The study found attentional difficulties in both modalities, suggesting a broader executive function impact. Also, do not generalize the visual task findings too strongly, as the difference between groups was smaller in the visual modality and task demands may have differed.