You’ve probably known it for a while — it’s even a punchline in parenting circles in conversations about kids’ unsavoury-yet-familiar habits that we just don’t know where they could have picked up. But if you’ve been holding out the hope that your sprogs are less astute than you think, you won’t like what you’re about to read. This is because a recent study by Ohio State University researchers (OSU) suggests that children pay attention to things that even adults ignore. The findings of the were published online in the Developmental Psychology journal.

The study

Researchers gathered 34 adults and 36-year-old four-year-old children to take part in a computer-based learning task.Images of colourful alien-like creatures appeared on their screens, each of which had seven identifiable features including a head, tail and antennae.

The participants were told that the creatures were either classed as “Flurps” or “Jalets” and that they had to make out which ones they saw on their screens.

The Flurps and Jalets always had a distinguishing feature between one another. For example, Flurps would have an orange tail, but Jalets would have a blue one. Additionally, the kids and adults were told that most – but not all – of the Jalets have a particular feature, like pink antennae.

There was also a common feature between the creatures that was never mentioned in the instructions. The researchers called it the “irrelevant feature”.

After some training, the participants were shown the images on their screens and pointed out whether they were Flurps or Jalets.

But, mid-experiment, the researchers changed things up unannounced and made it so that the irrelevant feature became the one that would distinguish between the creatures. Before, this feature was the same for both the Flurps and Jalets, but it then changed and became different.

The results

After the change, the adults in the experiment were more likely to be confused than the children because they were less likely to realise the importance of the newly relevant feature. But this wasn’t the case for the children, who were quick to notice that the previously irrelevant feature became the one that would help them make out the Flurps from the Jalets.

The adults also tried to think of the patterns they noticed to make their decision by factoring things like “most Flurps have pink antennae”, and so on.

Researcher’s take

Nathaniel Blanco, an OSU postdoctoral researcher involved in the study, said that the adults in the study suffered from “learned inattention”. This means that they didn’t focus on the formerly irrelevant feature because they didn’t think it would be essential for the task.

But this wasn’t a problem for the children, who found it easier to distribute their attention more broadly. This could be explained by the immaturity of the pre-frontal cortex region of the brain at their ages, according to Vladimir Sloutsky, study co-author and professor of psychology at OSU.

Sloutsky said that kids’ ability to spread their focus makes it easier for them to learn more because it helps them gather a lot of information. However, it also makes it difficult for them to focus their attention on individual tasks the way adults do.

He also stressed that adults could broadly distribute their attention when they need to, but that selective attention is more helpful for many of their daily tasks and is also crucial for effective performance at many jobs.And, yes, he also said that this could explain why children notice everything – even when we desperately wish they hadn’t!

So, the next time you think to drop some juicy gossip at your friend during a playdate because “the kids are too busy playing” to notice, here’s a friendly reminder from yours truly: abort mission. Immediately.

Written by : Tesneem Ayoub
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190805101125.html 

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