Flexible attention and modality preference in young children

It has been previously established (Sloutsky & Napolitano, in press) that when presented simultaneously with visual and auditory stimuli equated for discriminability and familiarity, 4-year-olds exhibited strong preference for auditory stimuli, failing to process visual stimuli. At the same time, they had no difficulty processing visual stimuli when these were presented without auditory stimuli. The current study examines the possibility that a flexible attentional mechanism underlies modality preference in young children. We specifically examine under which conditions young children are more likely to process auditory stimuli, and under which conditions they are more likely to process visual stimuli, when both stimuli are presented simultaneously. Results indicate that when visual stimuli are well familiar, 4-year-olds are likely to attend to visual stimuli, whereas when neither visual nor auditory stimuli are familiar, they are likely to attend to auditory stimuli.