Component 3: Attention and Inhibitory Control
Standard 3.a: Children’s skills increase in filtering impulses and sustaining attention on a task.
By the following age ranges, children typically, for example:
- Demonstrate caution around new or unusual people or events
- Explore objects by holding, mouthing, dropping, etc.
- Accepts a substitute toy in place of an object out of reach
- Attend to a short, familiar storybook but may not want to follow the book page by page
- Have a general understanding of the passing of time and the meaning of phrases like “not now” and “after lunch”
- Comply with simple two-part requests that involve waiting (e.g., “Eat your breakfast and then we’ll play with the blocks.”)
- Wait to be handed a desired object
- Attend to specific features of objects and identify elements within a complex figure (e.g., looking at a picture of a farmyard and pointing to and naming the figures of a horse, a duck, a cat, etc.)
- Follow adult directions when given simple guidance
- Focus on topics or materials of interest despite distractions (e.g., can dump out and solve a favorite puzzle, even with other children playing in the background)
- With adult support, avoid imitating the negative behavior of another child
- With adult reminders, wait to communicate information in a group
- Focus on increasingly complex topics for longer periods of time
- Return to complete a task if interrupted
- Count only those objects in a group that have a specific attribute (e.g., all of the red cars in a picture)
- Build block buildings and include such structural features as arches and ramps
- Without adult reminders, wait to communicate information in a group
- Maintain focus on a project for a sustained period of time and over several days
- Return with focus to an activity or project after having been away from it for a period of time
- Demonstrate an awareness of important activities that are “coming up” or “in the near future” (e.g., keeping track of the days until a birthday or vacation trip) as a strategy to control excitement
- Combine shapes into patterns that make new shapes or complete puzzles (e.g., rearranging a collection of circles and variously sized rectangles to make the image of a person)
- Build complex block buildings, intentionally maintaining such features as symmetry
