The Development of Visual Attention Controlling Aged from Children to Adult and Its Effect on Interface Design

The spatial cuing paradigm was used to investigate the development of control of visual attention from the childhood to the adult. Psychometric intelligence was measured using Raven Progressive Matrices before the experiment. Three age groups participants were matched in IQ. The experimental material was adopted on the standard spatial cuing paradigm, and the stimuli were presented and the participants´ reaction was recorded through the DMDX system. The reaction time of the children participants was significantly longer than those of the adolescence and adult participants (P = 0.005, 0.001), however, there was no significantly difference between the last two group(P = 0.546); Participants react more quickly in the valid cuing condition than in the invalid cuing in all groups(P = 0.001). Different individuals showed diverse characteristic of attention. So the interface design should pay more attention to the type of cues in the view of the individual age difference of clients to improve the friendship and efficiency of man-machine interface.