The effect of verbal priming of visual attention styles in 4-to 9-year-old children

The way humans attend to their visual field differs profoundly between individuals. Previous research suggests that people tend to have either an analytic style, with a higher focus on the salient object of a scene, or a holistic style, characterized by higher attention to a scene's contextual information. Although a general assumption in many studies has been that these attention styles are socialized in social interaction during childhood, not much work has focused on the proximal mechanisms underlying this development. This study focuses on language as a potential cultural tool to habitualize ways of perceiving the world and investigates whether the visual attention of 4- to 9-year-old children can be experimentally manipulated via verbal primes that accentuate either analytic or holistic processing. Results indicate that verbal priming is effective in guiding children's gaze behavior in an eye-tracking task and their verbal accounts in a picture description task, but it only influences the way visual scenes are remembered in a forced-choice recognition task after own verbal productions. In concert with previous cross-cultural and correlational studies, these findings provide convergent evidence for the assumption that verbal attention guidance plays an important role in the socialization of attention styles.