E-BTT in primary school-aged children: Preliminary results

Visuospatial orientation of attention is the cognitive process that allows to orient and focus on stimuli presented in the visual field. A cognitive-attentional bias towards one side of the visual field, often the left side, derives from cerebral, evolutionary, and cultural factors. Such a leftward bias is often referred to as “pseudoneglect”. School-aged children gradually shift spatial attention to the left, with differences related to manual dominance or to possible neurodevelopmental disorders. The new Enhanced-Baking Tray Task (E-BTT) is an ecological task that enriches the spatial exploration evaluation procedure by adding a digital/hardware platform to automate the data collection. For the first time we administered the E-BTT to school-aged children with the aim to explore children's initial orientation of spatial attention and to compare their performances to those of a sample of young adults who showed a leftward preference. Results showed that children, as adults, shifted their attention leftward in the E-BTT task, however not prominently as adults. Our results show that performances on E-BTT support what has been reported in the literature on leftward spatial bias shown in other tasks: that it emerges during development in relation to biological, cultural and biomechanical factors.