Richards, J.E., & Anderson, D.R. (2004). Attentional inertia in children’s extended looking at television. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 32, 163-212 (PDF)
In this chapter we consider sustained visual attention in children and adults. We focus on children’s looking at television, but we also consider sustained play with toys. Our work indicates that sustained looking at television or during play reveals attentional processes that have not been apparent in standard experimental studies of attention to static visual displays. In the child’s typical environment, attention is drawn to interesting, informative, and important aspects of the real world. The sensory and cognitive properties of such objects are often meaningful to the child and incorporate movement and change over time. We believe that often television programs and movies, and probably play with toys, mimic these types of stimuli and reveal patterns of attention that are not typically found in laboratory studies. In the present chapter, we focus on a phenomenon we call attentional inertia. Attentional inertia is a progressive increase in the attentional engagement as a look is sustained. In this chapter, we are primarily concerned with what happens once a look is initiated; why are looks subsequently sustained or terminated? We will review past work that shows attentional inertia during television and toy play, examine changes in the distribution of looks to television using data from a wide range of ages, and examine two quantitative models that account for extended looking during television viewing.