The Development of Visual Attention Skills

The goal of this paper is to determine the effect of length of cochlear implant (CI) use and other factors on the development of sustained visual attention in prelingually deaf children, and to investigate the relations between sustained visual attention and audiological outcomes with an implant. It includes retrospective analysis of data collected before cochlear implantation and over several years after implantation. Two groups of prelingually deaf children, one >6 years old (n=41) and one <6 years old (n=47) at testing, were given an age-appropriate Continuous Performance Task (CPT). In both groups, children monitored visually-presented numbers for several minutes and responded whenever a target number appeared. Hit rate, false alarm rate, and signal detection parameters were dependent measures of sustained visual attention. A number of independent variables were tested for effects on CPT performance. Several audiological outcome measures were found to be correlated with CPT scores. Mean CPT performance was low compared to published norms for normal-hearing children. CPT scores improved as a function of length of CI use over at least two years of use. In the younger group, a higher number of active electrodes predicted better CPT performance. In the older group, CPT performance after two years of CI use was correlated with vocabulary knowledge. These findings suggest that cochlear implantation in prelingually deaf children leads to improved sustained visual processing of numbers over two or more years of CI use.