Scientists have discovered that children struggle to concentrate on tasks and often absorb information that isn’t useful for their assignments. This raises the question: why does this happen?
Scientists have observed that children have difficulty concentrating on tasks, often gathering information that doesn’t aid them in completing their assignments. But what’s the reason behind this?
Recent research has shown that this “distributed attention” does not stem from an underdeveloped brain that fails to grasp the task at hand, nor is it simply due to being easily distracted or lacking focus.
It seems that kids tend to spread their attention widely, driven either by innate curiosity or because their working memory isn’t fully developed, which leads them to “over explore” while trying to complete a task.
Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and psychology professor at The Ohio State University, stated, “Children can’t seem to restrain themselves from collecting more information than necessary to finish a task, even when they know precisely what they need.”
Sloutsky and lead author Qianqian Wan, a doctoral psychology student at Ohio State, conducted the study recently published in the journal Psychological Science.
In their previous studies, Sloutsky and colleagues documented how children tend to distribute their attention broadly, lacking the ability of adults to efficiently complete tasks by ignoring irrelevant information.
This latest research confirmed that even when children manage to concentrate on a task to earn small rewards like stickers, they still engage in “over exploring” rather than focusing solely on what’s necessary to finish their assignments.
One aim of this research was to investigate whether children’s distractibility could explain their behavior.
In one study involving children aged 4 to 6 and adults, participants were asked to identify two types of bird-like creatures known as Hibi or Gora. Each type had a unique mix of colors and shapes for various body parts, like the horn, head, and tail. For six out of seven body parts, the combination of color and shape predicted the type with 66% accuracy. However, one specific body part always perfectly matched only one creature, which both children and adults learned to identify quickly.
To examine whether the children were easily distracted, the researchers covered each body part, making it necessary for participants to uncover them one at a time to identify the creature. They were rewarded for identifying the creature as promptly as possible.
Adults found this task straightforward. Knowing the tail was the body part that perfectly identified a creature, they would uncover the tail first and identify the creature correctly.
Children, however, acted differently. Even when aware that the tail was the key identifying body part, they would uncover that first but still check other body parts before making a decision.
“The children weren’t distracted — everything was hidden. They could have followed the adults’ lead and just uncovered the crucial body part, but they didn’t,” Sloutsky explained.
“They continued to uncover more body parts before deciding.”
Another possibility, Sloutsky noted, is that children simply enjoy pressing buttons. Thus, in another study, they allowed both adults and children to tap a single “express” button to reveal the entire creature and its parts or to tap on each body part separately.
The children mostly opted for the express option, revealing the whole creature with a single tap for decision-making, indicating they weren’t just pressing for amusement.
Future research will investigate whether this extra exploration is due to curiosity. However, Sloutsky suspects that the more plausible explanation is that children’s working memory is not yet fully developed. This means they cannot retain the necessary information to finish a task for as long as adults can.
“Children understand that one body part lets them identify the creature, but they may be unsure whether they remember correctly. Their working memory is still in development,” Sloutsky said.
“They seek to resolve this uncertainty by looking at other body parts to see if they match their initial thoughts.”
As children’s working memory improves, they gain confidence in retaining information longer, becoming more similar to adults in their behavior.
Future studies will clarify whether curiosity or working memory is the underlying issue, Sloutsky concluded.
This research received support from a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
