Warning to
Adults: Children Notice Everything
Kids
have learning advantage in some situations, study finds
By Jeff
Grabmeier, Ohio State University
August 5,
2019 -- Adults are really good at paying attention only to what you tell them
to – but children don’t ignore anything.
That
difference can actually help children do better than adults in some learning
situations, a new study suggests.
Researchers
surprised adults and 4- and 5-year-old children participating in the study by
making information that was irrelevant at the beginning of the experiment
suddenly important for a task they had to complete.
“Adults had a
hard time readjusting because they didn’t learn the information they thought
wouldn’t be important,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and
professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.
“Children, on
the other hand, recovered quickly to the new circumstances because they weren’t
ignoring anything. I’m sure a lot of parents will recognize that tendency of
children to notice everything, even when you wish they wouldn’t.”
Sloutsky
conducted the study with Nathaniel Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher in
psychology at Ohio State. Their research was published online in the journal Developmental
Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.
The results
show that children tend to distribute their attention broadly, while adults use
selective attention to focus on information they believe is most important,
Sloutsky said.
“Distributing
attention may be adaptive for young children. By being attentive to everything,
they gather more information which helps them learn more,” Blanco said.
In one study,
the researchers had 34 adults and 36 4-year-old children take part in a learning
task.
They were
presented with colorful images of “alien” creatures on a computer that had
seven identifiable features, including antennae, head and tail.
Participants
were told there were two types of creatures, called Flurps and Jalets, and that
they had to figure out which ones were which.
One feature
was always different on Flurps and Jalets – for example, the Jalets may have a
blue tail and the Flurps an orange tail. In addition, the children and adults
were told that most (but not all) of the Flurps had a certain type of feature,
such as pink antennae.
One of the
features was never mentioned in the instructions and it did not differ between
the types of creatures. This was what the researchers called the “irrelevant
feature.”
After
training, participants were shown a series of images of the creatures on the
computer screen and indicated whether each one was a Flurp or a Jalet.
But halfway
through the experiment, the researchers made an unannounced switch: The
irrelevant feature became the feature that would determine whether the creature
was a Flurp or a Jalet. This feature, which had been the same for both
creatures before the switch, was now different.
After the
shift, the adults were more confused than the children were – they were less
likely to learn the importance of the new feature.
In contrast,
children were quick to realize that the formerly irrelevant feature was now the
feature that would always reveal the difference between Flurps and Jalets.
Adults tried
to use the probabilistic rules (such as “most of the Flurps have pink
antennae”) to guide their choices after the shift.
In this
study, adults suffered from “learned inattention,” Blanco said. They didn’t pay
attention to the formerly irrelevant feature because they believed it wouldn’t
be important.
Children as
young as those in this study often have difficulty focusing attention in the
way that the adults did, Sloutsky said.
“The
immediate reason is the immaturity of their pre-frontal cortex,” he said. “But
we believe that distributing attention broadly also helps them learn more.”
Sloutsky
emphasized that adults have no problem distributing attention broadly if
necessary. But in many tasks that adults do every day, selective attention is
helpful.
“It is clear
that for optimal performance at most jobs, selective attention is necessary.
But distributed attention might be useful when you’re learning something new
and need to see everything that is going on.”
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