When They’re Not Paying Attention, Children Can Learn as Much as Adults

Children’s short attention spans are often framed as a barrier to learning, leading them to fidget, daydream, and talk when they should be focusing on the lesson at hand. Research published in Psychological Science suggests, however, that children’s limited ability to focus could actually enhance their ability to remember information that adults ignore. 

“Unlike adults who learned better when we asked them to pay attention, we found that kids learned information equally well when we asked them to focus on it and do something else entirely,” Marlie Tandoc, Bharat Nadendla, Theresa Pham, and Amy S. Finn (University of Toronto) wrote in reporting their findings. “These results suggest that a sponge may be a good metaphor for learning during childhood: Children appear to take things in regardless of whether they are trying to or not.” 

Tandoc and colleagues arrived at this conclusion through a pair of studies on age-related differences in selective attention. 

In their first study, the researchers instructed 35 adults and 42 children to press a button every time a new image appeared on-screen. Next, participants were shown fragmented versions of drawings, some of which were new and some of which they had just seen, and were tasked with identifying the images as quickly as possible while additional fragments faded into view. 

Adults responded more quickly and accurately than children when identifying images they had previously paid attention to, demonstrating how our ability to selectively attend to information improves with age, the researchers wrote. 

In their second study, 60 adults and 53 children viewed the same set of drawings used in the earlier study. But this time they were instructed to pay attention to a series of yellow shapes that had been overlaid on the larger images instead of the images themselves. To measure their working memory, participants were tasked with pressing a button when the same shape they had seen one, two, or three images prior appeared on-screen. After completing the shape task, participants were then given the additional task of identifying fragmented versions of the underlying drawings in the same way that participants had in the previous study.

Although adults correctly recalled more yellow shapes than children during the working memory task, children and adults were equally accurate at identifying the fragmented images of the underlying drawings. 

“These findings demonstrate a striking developmental difference: Instructing adults to attend benefits their learning, something that is not true for children. Instead, children learn task-irrelevant information just as well as if they were told to attend to it in the first place,” Tandoc and colleagues wrote. 

These findings could eventually help support learning based on students’ developmental level, Tandoc said in an interview with APS. For example, teaching younger students in exploratory environments and encouraging natural play could help support kids’ tendency to absorb information from their environments. Meanwhile, college students may learn more from lectures that explicitly call out what information they need to study, she said. 

“[Adults] are really good at filtering information, but if that information later becomes relevant, we might have missed it,” Tandoc said. “It might be really important that instructors make clear the goal of a lecture so that college students know what to pay attention to.” 

Future work could further explore how children and adults attend to different types of information, as well as how these differences are reflected in structural changes in the brain, she said. 

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Reference 

Tandoc, M. C., Nadendla, B., Pham, T., & Finn, A. S. (2024). Directing attention shapes learning in adults but not children. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241263347