Visual exogenous and endogenous attention and visual memory in preschool children who stutter

Purpose: Attention develops gradually from infancy to the preschool years and beyond. Exogenous attention, consisting of automatic responses to salient stimuli, develops in infancy, whereas endogenous attention, or voluntary attention, begins to develop later, in the preschool years. The purpose of this study was to examine (a) exogenous and endogenous attention in young children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) through two conditions of a visual sustained selective attention task, and (b) visual short-term memory (STM) between groups within the context of this task. Method: 42 CWS and 42 CWNS, ages 3;0-5;5 (years;months), were pair-matched in age, gender (31 males, 11 females per group), and socioeconomic status. Children completed a visual tracking task (Track-It Task; Fisher et al., 2013) requiring sustained selective attention and engaging exogenous and endogenous processes. Following each item, children were asked to recall the item they had tracked, as a memory check. Results: The CWS group demonstrated significantly less accuracy in overall tracking and visual memory for the tracked stimuli, compared to the CWNS group. Across groups, the children performed better in sustained selective attention when the target stimuli were more salient (the condition tapping both exogenous and endogenous attention) than when stimuli were less so (the condition tapping primarily endogenous processes). Conclusions: Relative to peers, preschool-age CWS, as a group, display weaknesses in visual sustained selective attention and visual STM.