Frustrated that the kid in your life can’t seem to pay attention when you are trying to teach them something? You don’t need to be, say psychologists at the University of Toronto.
Research from the Learning and Neural Development (LAND) Lab finds that children learn just as much whether they are trying to or not. Adults, on the other hand, tend to ignore information that they aren’t paying attention to.
“Don’t get mad at the little boy who’s doing jumping jacks while you’re reading a book,” says Amy Finn, associate professor in the Department of Psychology.
“He’s probably still listening and learning even though it doesn’t necessarily look like it.”
Children really are like sponges
“Directed Attention Shapes Learning in Adults but Not Children,” published in Psychological Science, shows that there is more truth than previously thought in the old saying that children are like sponges. The paper was authored by Finn, Marlie C. Tandoc, Bharat Nadendla, and Theresa Pham.
As part of this study, researchers tested how much children and adults learned about drawings of common objects after two different experiments. In the first, they told participants to pay attention to the drawings. In the other, participants were told to ignore the drawings as they completed an entirely different task. After each, participants had to identify fragments of the drawings they saw as quickly as possible.
Unlike adults, who learned more about the drawings when told to pay attention to them, children learned about them just as well across both experiments.
Looked at from another angle, children’s learning wasn’t negatively impacted when they weren't paying attention to the information they were tested on.
“I don’t think that I was prepared for that after years of looking at manipulations of attention,” says Finn.
Selective attention takes time
Children’s selective attention, or their ability to focus on a specific task and tune out distractions, develops slowly and doesn’t fully mature until early adulthood.
Previous research has found that unlike adults, a child’s brain treats information that they are told to pay attention to similarly to information they are not told to attend to. That is likely one of the reasons why children are so good at picking up languages spoken around them.
“As adults, we really filter what we’re learning through our goals and task demands. Whereas kids are absorbing everything regardless of that, seemingly without even trying,” says Tandoc, former LAND lab manager and current PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania.
Returning to a child-like state of learning might sound appealing, but selective attention has several benefits. Across experiments, attentional instruction boosts learning in adults. In other words, adults learn better when told what information is most important.
This research can change the ways parents, teachers, and curriculum designers think about how children and adults learn. It underlines the benefits of encouraging play and presenting children with more immersive learning opportunities. For adults, defining a clear task or goal at the beginning of a class or workshop is important for learning.
“For me, when I’m hanging out with my five-year-old, I’m less worried now than I was otherwise about whether or not he is learning something if it doesn’t seem like he is paying attention,” says Finn.