Healthcare (Commonwealth Union) – Researchers have discovered that young children often struggle to concentrate on a single task, frequently absorbing information that isn’t directly useful for completing their assignment. This has posed a question as to why does this happen?
In a recent study, scientists found that this tendency for “distributed attention” isn’t due to children’s brains being too immature to grasp the task or focus, nor is it because they are easily distracted or lack the ability to control their attention.
Instead, researchers stated that it seems that kids spread their attention widely either out of being naturally curios or because their working memory is not yet developed enough to help them finish tasks without “over-exploring.”
Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and a psychology professor at The Ohio State University noted that children seem unable to resist collecting more information than they need, even when they clearly know what’s necessary to complete the task.
The research, led by Qianqian Wan, a doctoral student at Ohio State, was recently published in the journal Psychological Science.
In previous studies, Sloutsky and his team have shown that children tend to spread their attention widely and lack the ability adults have to focus on what’s relevant to efficiently complete tasks. Unlike adults, they don’t easily ignore irrelevant details.
In this new research, Sloutsky and Wan confirmed that even when children learn to focus their attention in order to earn small rewards like stickers, they still tend to “over-explore” and don’t limit their attention only to what’s necessary for the task at hand.
One objective of this study was to determine whether children’s tendency to get distracted could explain this behavior.
In one experiment, researchers worked with children aged 4 to 6 and adults. Participants were asked to identify two types of bird-like creatures called Hibi or Gora. Each creature had a unique combination of colors and shapes for various body parts like the horn, head, beak, body, wing, feet, and tail. Six of these body parts had features that predicted whether it was a Hibi or Gora with 66% accuracy. However, one body part was always a perfect match to one of the creatures, and both children and adults quickly learned which one it was.
To test whether children were easily distracted, researchers covered up the body parts, requiring participants to reveal each part one by one to figure out which creature they were looking at. Participants were rewarded for identifying the creature as quickly as possible.
For adults, the task was straightforward. Having knowledge that the tail always matched perfectly with one of the two creatures, they would simply uncover the tail and correctly identify the creature.
Children, however, behaved differently. Even if they had learned that the tail always identified the creature accurately, they would still reveal the tail first—but would continue uncovering other body parts before making their decision.
“There was nothing to distract the children – everything was covered up. They could do like the adults and only click on the body part that identified the creature, but they did not,” added Sloutsky.
“They just kept uncovering more body parts before they made their choice.”
Another possibility, according to Sloutsky, is that children enjoy pressing the buttons. In a separate study, researchers allowed both adults and children to either make a single tap on an “express” button to reveal the entire creature along with all its parts or to tap on each body part individually to uncover it.
Children mostly opted for the express option, tapping once to display the creature in order to decide what type it was. This suggests that their clicking wasn’t solely for enjoyment.
Future research will investigate whether this unnecessary exploration stems from mere curiosity, Sloutsky noted. However, he believes that the more plausible explanation is that children’s working memory is not fully developed. This means they struggle to retain the information needed to complete a task for extended periods, especially compared to adults.
