Children, better than adults in certain learning conditions

Adults selectively focus on a particular item, while children pay attention to all the details around. This difference may help the latter perform better than adults when placed in learning situations, a new study by American researchers shows.

 

According to a recent study, adults pay attention only to what they hear. Unlike them, children do not select information, but store all the information they receive. This difference can help children do better than adults when they have to learn certain things.

 

Children pay a lot of attention to details

Scientists noted that, on the one hand, if adults encountered readjustment difficulties, because they did not pay attention to information they thought would not be important, children, on the other hand, readjusted to the new circumstances, because they tend to ignore nothing. On the contrary: they store everything they hear and pay close attention to details. This confirms that little ones have a tendency to notice everything, even when adults have the impression that this is not happening.

 

The results of the study show that young people tend to distribute their attention on a large scale, while adults use only selective attention, to focus on the information they think is most important. Attention sharing can be adaptive for young children. By being aware of everything that is going on around them, they gather a lot of information that helps them learn many things, experts explain.

 

Children, more vigilant than adults

After the research, participants were shown a series of pictures of the creatures on the computer screen and were given the task of indicating whether the creatures are a Flurp or a Jalet. But halfway through, the researchers made a major change: the irrelevant feature became the feature that determined whether the creature was a Flurp or a Jalet. This feature, which had been the same for both creatures before the change, was now different. After this change, adults were more confused than children – they were less likely to learn the importance of the new feature.

 

Instead, the children realized that the previously irrelevant feature has now become the feature that can reveal which of the creatures belong to the Flurps group and which belong to the Jalets group.

 

The researchers say that in the study adults suffered from “learning inattention”. They did not pay attention to the feature, which was then irrelevant, because they thought it would not be important and tried to identify which of the creatures belong to the Flurps group and which belong to the Jalets group using probabilistic rules (for example, most Flurps have pink antennas), to guide their choices after the major change during the experiment.

 

There are many cases when children often have difficulty channeling their attention, as has happened in the adult study participants. Experts say that the fault is the immaturity of the pre-frontal cortex. They also believe that the distribution of attention in general helps them to learn much more than they have the impression of adults.

 

The researchers point out that adults have no problem in distributing their attention to a large extent, if necessary. But in many tasks they undertake every day, selective attention is useful. It is obvious that selective attention is required for workplace performance. But the distributed attention can be useful when you want to learn new things and you have to focus your attention on everything that is happening around you, the researchers concluded.




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