Poster #12 - Younger isn’t better: Broader attention does not facilitate learning peripheral information

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Background: Adults are capable of narrowing their attention and filtering extraneous information to complete particular tasks. Usually, this skill is highly useful; however, it can mean that when attending to particular task demands, adults are “blind” to patterns that are peripheral to those demands. In the present experiment, we explored whether children, who have limited filtering abilities (Plebanek & Sloutsky, 2017) are less “blind” to peripheral information that can directly impact task performance. Additionally, because some authors propose a qualitative shift from broader to narrower attention at age 7 (Deng & Sloutsky 2016), we investigate whether younger children (aged 5-6) differ from older children (aged 7-10) in their ability to learn peripheral information.

Methods: We tested 32 adults, 56 older children, and 30 young children. Participants saw one of two centrally presented target stimuli, and were asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether this central stimulus was a letter or a number. On each trial, these targets had an identical pair of flanking stimuli (*, @, or #) that were not relevant to the task of determining whether the central stimulus was a letter or number. Unbeknownst to participants, some flankers were highly correlated with a particular target (consistent trials), while rarely appearing with the other target (inconsistent trials).

Results: As expected, we observed a main effect of age for reaction time (p < .001), where, regardless of trial type, adults were consistently faster than older children (p < .001), who were faster than younger children (p < .001). Further analyses assessed whether reaction times differed for consistent vs inconsistent trials, with such a difference indicating that participants had learned the embedded target-flanker relationships. We found that adults were slower on inconsistent trials as compared with consistent trials (p = .001), while, in contrast, older children demonstrated a moderate trend towards slower response times for inconsistent trials (p = .118), and younger children’s reaction times did not differ by trial type (p = .921).
Analyses of accuracy by trial type revealed a similar pattern. We observed a main effect of age (p < .001), where adults were more accurate than older children (p < .001), who were more accurate than younger children (p < .001). Critically, participants also exhibited a main effect of trial type on accuracy, with higher accuracy on consistent than inconsistent trials (p < .001). Interestingly, adults exhibited a trend for higher accuracy in consistent trials relative to inconsistent (p = .094), while older children showed significantly higher accuracy in consistent trials (p < .001), and younger children showed no trial type differences (p > .99).

Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that both adults and older children are capable of learning task-irrelevant, peripheral information, however, in contrast to our predictions, the reduced attentional capabilities of children did not translate into a linear increase in learning such information. Specifically, younger children showed no effect of trial type on accuracy or reaction time, in contrast to older children and adults, whose performance supported a distinction between trial types.

Authors

• Michael Dubois, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Noel Yuen Hoi Hang, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lavania Jeganathan, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Danielle Lim, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Theresa Pham, University of Western Ontario
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amy S Finn, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author