2-195 - Growing Up in a Multisensory World

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

We live in dynamic, multisensory environments, in which children must select the appropriate information matching their current goals. However, since research on attention and learning typically involves unisensory stimuli, there is a paucity of evidence concerning how children learn from, and selectively attend to, information in a multisensory environment. Talks in this symposium will shed novel light on how the multisensory nature of environments shapes children’s (1) learning and (2) selective attention.

Our first paper will discuss how, in young children, multisensory information, of the sort commonly used in educational settings, can both support and hinder incidental learning, depending on the sensory modality. In the next paper we elucidate the mechanism through which inattention disrupts multisensory learning of novel object-labels, showing that unsuccessful learning is due to disrupted encodings of individual unimodal components.

The third paper discusses children’s ability to shift their attention between modalities. Children were less efficient at switching between different target categories; however, they were as efficient as adults in shifting attention cross-modally. Lastly, we will demonstrate the differential effects of distractor types (visual, auditory and audiovisual), dependent on prior experiences. In a selective-attention task with familiar, real-world stimuli, older participants, with greater stimulus experience, were distracted most by multisensory stimuli, exhibiting mainly attentional costs; young children, whose selective-attention skills are still developing, were “shielded” from such distraction, and benefitted from distractor-sounds.

Together, this symposium will highlight the important ways in which multisensory designs advance our understanding of cognitive development in naturalistic environments.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Natasha Kirkham, Birkbeck, University of London

Individual Presentations

• Incidental Leaning and Cognitive Load in a Multisensory Environment Across Childhood - Presenting Author: Hannah Broadbent, Birkbeck, University of London; Denis Mareschal, Birkbeck College; Natasha Kirkham, Birkbeck, University of London

• Effect of Brief Episodes of Inattention on Multisensory Learning - Presenting Author: Karrie Elizabeth Godwin, Kent State University; Anna Fisher, Carnegie Mellon University

• Attentional Control in Task-Switching and Modality-Shifting Across Development - Presenting Author: Anna Peng, Birkbeck, University of London; Denis Mareschal, Birkbeck College; Natasha Kirkham, Birkbeck, University of London

• Taking attention back to school: Multisensory contexts reveal multi-pronged effects of experience on selective attention - Presenting Author: Pawel J Matusz, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois; Rebecca Merkley, University of Oxford; Gaia Scerif, St. Andrews College, Oxford University