A. van der Leij

Bottom-up and top-down attention are independent

What is the relationship between top-down and bottom-up attention? Are both types of attention tightly interconnected, or are they independent? We investigated this by testing a large representative sample of the Dutch population on two attentional tasks: a visual search task gauging the efficiency of top-down attention and a singleton capture task gauging bottom-up attention. On both tasks we found typical performance--i.e., participants displayed a significant search slope on the search task and significant slowing caused by the unique, but irrelevant, object on the capture task. Moreover, the high levels of significance we observed indicate that the current set-up provided very high signal to noise ratios, and thus enough power to accurately unveil existing effects. Importantly, in this robust investigation we did not observe any correlation in performance between tasks. The use of Bayesian statistics strongly confirmed that performance on both tasks was uncorrelated. We argue that the current results suggest that there are two attentional systems that operate independently. We hypothesize that this may have implications beyond our understanding of attention. For instance, it may be that attention and consciousness are intertwined differently for top-down attention than for bottom-up attention.

Ethnic background, classroom instruction and child behaviour in kindergarten: the role of the teacher to stimulate children in the classroom by giving individual attention

SUMMARY In 45 classes of 29 schools for Dutch primary education 273 4-year old children (6 per class) with different ethnic background and their teachers were observed during their classroom activities in both whole-class and individual setting. A 10 category observation system was used to describe l the level of pupil involvement and the verbal interaction; a 19 category observation system was designed to describe teacher behaviour on two aspects: what is the object of teacher behaviour (whole class versus individual pupil; and yes/no target pupil) and what kind of behaviour is shown by the teacher (academic or management behaviour). Data will be presented to test the following hypotheses: 1. (1) there is no difference in pupil involvement due to background; 2. (2) ethnic background is related to level of verbal interaction; 3. (3) individual teacher attention is related to pupil involvement; 4. (4) the teacher attention (general stimulating versus direct steering; verbal versus nonverbal) is related to ...