Visual foraging and executive functions: A developmental perspective.

Visual foraging tasks, where participants search for multiple targets at a time, may provide a richer picture of visual attention than traditional single-target visual search tasks. To contribute to the mapping of foraging abilities throughout childhood and to assess whether foraging ability is dependent upon EF abilities, we compared the foraging of 66 children aged 4-7 years (mean age = 5.68 years, SD = 0.97 years, 33 girls), 67 children aged 11-12 years (mean age = 11.80 years, SD = 0.30 years; 36 girls), and 31 adults aged 20-37 (mean age 30.32 years, SD 4.37 years, 18 females) in Iceland, with a task involving multiple targets of different types. We also measured three subdomains of executive functions; inhibition, attentional flexibility, and working memory. Our results show that foraging improves dramatically between the preschool and middle school years, with the older children showing similar foraging abilities as adults due to greater ease of switching between target types. The older children and adults randomly switch between target templates during feature foraging, but exhaustively forage for a single target type before switching during conjunction foraging. Younger children, conversely, tended to also stick to the same target type for long runs during feature foraging, showing that they have difficulties with feature-based tasks. Switch costs were much lower for the older children than the youngest age group, and on par with those of adults, resulting in fast and efficient foraging. Lastly, we found a connection between foraging ability and both working memory and attentional flexibility, but not inhibition. Our study shows that foraging is a promising way of studying visual attention, how it changes throughout the lifespan, and how it is connected to other cognitive functions.