Knowledge of Results in Simultaneous and Successive Tasks: What Children Can Teach us

Abstract

One goal of the present study was to re-examine how children perform on simultaneous and successive vigilance tasks. A previous study found that, unlike adults, children exhibit higher perceptual sensitivity on successive versus simultaneous vigilance tasks. A second goal was to examine how children respond to three different types of knowledge of results (KR to correct detections, false alarms, and irrelevant KR). Thirty children performed two tasks (simultaneous and successive) with 10 assigned to each KR condition. Their performance was measured with the nonparametric indices A′ and B″, as well as response times to correct detections. The results showed that children exhibited higher perceptual sensitivity on the successive as opposed to the simultaneous task. KR to correct detections resulted in the most liberal response criterion and the shortest response times. Collectively, the results suggest that children do not necessarily perform like adults on visual tasks and highlight the need for human factors professionals to exercise caution when appealing to the adult literature for children's design issues.