Gender and Attention Development in Children in Play Situations in Abidjan/Côte d'Ivoire

The presence of play in life raises questions about its relationship with human development, behavioral functions, particularly physical, social-emotional and cognitive. Since attention is one of the cognitive functions that regulate human functioning, the study of its development led us to analyze its relationship with gender in children in play situations. To do this, we selected 144 children aged 7 to 11 years, 72 of whom were girls and 72 boys from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds in Abidjan. These subjects were selected on the basis of a questionnaire and trained to play "4-cross" (traditional game) and video rally (electronic game). These participants were evaluated by the Double Barrage Test (T-2-B) of Zazzo (1969) and the Continuous Performance Test of Rosvold et al. (1956) adapted (WinCPT). The results of these tests do not show a significant difference between the performance of girls and boys. However, a qualitative analysis shows a tendency to differences in the strategies used by girls and boys in the execution of attention tasks. Boys tend to use visual and spatial strategies more often. They are faster in certain spatial-visual tasks and use more autonomous strategies, which are better adapted to new situations. On the other hand, girls tend to be faster in processing certain types of information : in perceptual speed and inaccuracy. These results, which do not confirm the hypothesis, converge with some previous work.