Attending to Relevant Visual Distraction Promotes Science Learning in Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

Children often show poorer learning within richly decorated learning environments (e.g., Fisher et al., 2014), consistent with the idea that distraction is detrimental to learning. However, research has also shown that young children can effectively learn from distracting information that is relevant to an ongoing task (e.g., Blanco & Sloutsky, 2019). Separate work has additionally shown that children with more advanced selective attention spent more time exploring and learning from relevant distractors (King & Markant, 2020). These studies suggest that a more visually complex learning environment may not necessarily be detrimental to learning, dependent on the content of distractors and the selective attention abilities of the child. We therefore presented both lesson-relevant and lesson-irrelevant visuals within educational displays to investigate 1) how children visually sample relevant vs. irrelevant information during lessons, 2) if the availability of lesson-relevant distractors in the learning environment can benefit learning, and 3) how individual differences in selective attention abilities affect children’s attention to distractors and learning outcomes.

Method. Three-to-five-year-old children (N = 101) viewed a central video science lesson while four distractors appeared in each corner (Figure 1). Children completed four trial types: 1) baseline, with no distractors; 2) relevant, in which all distractors related to lesson content; 3) irrelevant, in which all distractors were unrelated to lesson content; and 4) mixed, in which half of the distractors were related and half were unrelated to lesson content. We recorded participants’ eye movements during the video lessons to examine their looking to the distractors. We assessed learning of lesson content by comparing performance on pre- and post-lesson knowledge questions. We also used the Track-It task (Fisher et al., 2013) to assess individual differences in sustained selective attention skills.

Results. Children spent overall more time looking at relevant vs. irrelevant distractors (p < .001), suggesting that they actively selected information that reinforced lesson content. Age, selective attention skills, and baseline knowledge of lesson topics were unrelated to distractor looking (p’s > .08). Children showed similar learning of lesson content across distraction trial types (p = 0.65). We used multiple regression to examine predictors of individual differences in learning of lesson content. Results indicated that looking to relevant and irrelevant distractors influenced learning during the mixed trial. Increased looking to irrelevant distractors predicted reduced learning (β = -0.87, SEM = 0.35, t(100) = -2.44, p = .02), whereas increased looking to relevant distractors predicted increased learning (β = 0.60, SEM = 0.30, t(100) = 1.98, p = .05).

Discussion. Children were more likely to look at relevant distractors and increased looking to these distractors promoted learning when both relevant and irrelevant distraction was present. These results suggest that the effects of visual distraction on early learning depend on both distractor content and how children actively select distracting information. A complex learning environment containing both relevant and irrelevant visual information may prompt students to identify and focus on content relevant for learning, increasing their engagement with educational materials and boosting their learning outcomes.

Authors

• Jill King, Tulane University
  Presenting Author

• Julie Markant, Tulane University
  Non-Presenting Author