Distributed attention in children is about curiosity, not boredom, researchers find

Educators of children in all age groups frequently complain about a lack of attention to the task at hand.

Some attribute this to a lack of maturity, or a lack of interest in the subject, but a new study into this phenomenon – which researchers termed ‘distributed attention’ is actually about simple curiosity in many cases, along with their working memory not yet being developed enough to complete a task without “over exploring.”

“Children can’t seem to stop themselves from gathering more information than they need to complete a task, even when they know exactly what they need,” co-author Professor Vladimir Sloutsky from The Ohio State University explained.

Professor Sloutsky conducted the study with lead author Qianqian Wan, a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State, building on his previous work which has documented how children distribute their attention broadly, and don’t seem to have the ability of adults to efficiently complete tasks by ignoring anything that is not relevant to their mission.

In the new research, Sloutsky and Wan confirmed that even when children successfully learn how to focus their attention on a task to earn small rewards such as stickers, they still “over explore” and don’t concentrate just on what is needed to complete their assignment.

In one study, the researchers worked with children four to six years of age, as well as adults. 

Participants were told they were going to identify two types of bird-like creatures called Hibi or Gora. Each type had a unique combination of colours and shapes for their horn, head, beak, body, wing, feet and tail. 

For six of the seven body parts, the combination of colour and shape predicted whether it was a Hibi or Gora with 66 per cent accuracy. But one body part always was a perfect match to only one of the creatures, which both children and adults quickly learned to identify in the first part of the study.

In order to test whether children were easily distracted, the researchers covered up each body part, meaning the study participants had to uncover them one by one to identify which creature it was. They were rewarded for identifying the creature as quickly as possible.

For adults, the task was easy. If they knew the tail was the body part that was always matched perfectly with one of the two types of creatures, they always uncovered the tail and correctly identified the creature.

But the children were different. If they had learned the tail was the body part that always identified a creature perfectly, they would uncover that first – but they would still uncover other body parts before they made their choice.

“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,” Professor Sloutsky said.

“They just kept uncovering more body parts before they made their choice.”

Researchers then hypothesized that “children just like tapping on buttons” and so they gave adults and children the opportunity to make just one tap on an “express” button to reveal the whole creature and all of its parts, or to tap on each body part individually to reveal it.

Children predominantly chose the express option to just tap once to reveal the creature to make their decision of what type it was, demonstrating that they weren’t just “clicking for the fun of it.”

Future studies will look at whether this unneeded exploration is simple curiosity, Professor Sloutsky said, however he thinks the more likely explanation is that working memory is not fully developed in children. That means they don’t hold information they need to complete a task in their memory for very long, at least not as long as adults.

“The children learned that one body part will tell them what the creature is, but they may be concerned that they don’t remember correctly. Their working memory is still under development,” he explained.

“They want to resolve this uncertainty by continuing to sample, by looking at other body parts to see if they line up with what they think.”

As children’s working memory matures, they feel more confident in their ability to retain information for a longer time, he said, and act more like adults do.

Access the study in full here.