Additional factors and young children's distractability during street-crossing.

In a first experiment the hypothesis was tested that young children are impulsive and therefore unreliable in traffic. A distractional factor in the environment would lead the child to forget all about traffic and to cross without stopping and looking for traffic. This assumption was tested with 106 children of ages 4, 5 and 6 using different crossing conditions. Overall crossing performance increases with age, bit younger children are no more distractable than older ones. Boys are more distractable in traffic than girls.