Short Report: Environmental Sensitivity in Children is Associated with Visual Working Memory and Visual Search Performance

Highly sensitive children perceive and process stimuli more deeply but the developmental mechanisms enabling this deeper processing are not widely understood yet. Ninety-seven 7–9-year-old (M = 7.99, SD = 0.34) UK primary school children (47% girls) completed tasks on visual working memory and visual search. Teachers and children reported on children’s environmental sensitivity. Only child-rated sensitivity positively predicted visual working memory performance, with less sensitive children scoring particularly low. Teacher-rated sensitivity predicted fewer false positive errors in a visual search task. Sensitivity did not predict reaction times. The discussion highlights that we did not find strong evidence for greater visual working memory in highly sensitive children, but the low sensitive group merits further research. Visual search findings suggested that highly sensitive children make fewer impulsive mistakes, aligning with theory and research. In conclusion, we identified novel evidence of environmental sensitivity predicting both visual working memory and visual search performance.