Children are still learning, even if they aren’t attentive, new research shows 

Children are learning even when it seems as though they aren’t paying attention, new research from the University of Toronto has shown, with psychologists finding that they learn just as much whether they’re trying to or not, unlike adults. 

The findings are outlined in a new study published in the journal Psychological Science which outlines the testing researchers undertook, with children and adults demonstrating what they learned about drawings of common objects after two different experiments.

In the first, they told participants to pay attention to the drawings. In the second, participants were told to ignore the drawings and complete an entirely different task. After each scenario, participants had to identify fragments of the drawings they saw as quickly as possible.

They found that children learned about the drawings just as well across both scenarios, while adults learned more when told to pay attention to the drawings – in other words, the children’s learning wasn’t negatively impacted when they weren’t paying attention to the information they were tested on.

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.

Although returning to a child-like state of learning might sound appealing, selective attention does hold several benefits. Across experiments, attentional instruction was found to boost learning in adults. In other words, adults learn better when told what information is most important.

“Don’t get mad at the little boy who’s doing jumping jacks while you’re reading a book,” senior author Associate Professor Amy Finn said. “He’s probably still listening and learning even though it doesn’t necessarily look like it.”

The research has the potential to influence how parents, teachers and curriculum designers think about how children and adults learn. For instance, for children, the findings underline the benefits of play and immersive learning. For adults, defining a clear task or goal at the beginning of a class or workshop is important for learning outcomes.

To access the findings in full please see here.