In a study published in the journal Developmental Psychology, a team of researchers surprised adult and young participants by making information that was irrelevant at the beginning of the study 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; children, on the other hand, recovered quickly to the new circumstances because they weren’t ignoring anything.
Young children notice everything — even when they don’t have to. Image credit: Hai Nguyen Tien.
“Our results show that children tend to distribute their attention broadly, while adults use selective attention to focus on information they believe is most important,” said Ohio State University’s Professor Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study.
“Distributing attention may be adaptive for young children. By being attentive to everything, they gather more information which helps them learn more,” added co-author Dr. Nathaniel Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher at the Ohio State University.
In one experiment, the researchers had 34 adults and 36 children (4 years old) take part in a learning task.
Participants were presented with colorful images of ‘alien’ creatures on a computer that had seven identifiable features, including antennae, head and tail.
They 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 team 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 scientists 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 to guide their choices after the shift.
“In this study, adults suffered from learned inattention. They didn’t pay attention to the formerly irrelevant feature because they believed it wouldn’t be important,” Dr. Blanco said.
“Children as young as those in this study often have difficulty focusing attention in the way that the adults did,” Professor Sloutsky added.
“The immediate reason is the immaturity of their pre-frontal cortex. But we believe that distributing attention broadly also helps them learn more.”
“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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Nathaniel J. Blanco & Vladimir M. Sloutsky. Adaptive flexibility in category learning? Young children exhibit smaller costs of selective attention than adults. Developmental Psychology, published online July 1, 2019; doi: 10.1037/dev0000777
