Poster #1 - Age and Selective Attention Interact to Influence Children’s Learning from Meaningful Distraction

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Classroom environments for young children are often highly decorated. Studies suggest that these crowded displays can negatively impact student learning (e.g., Fisher et al., 2014), consistent with the idea that distraction is detrimental to learning. However, research has also identified contexts in which increased distraction can benefit learning. Declining selective attention (SA) during aging results in poorer distractor suppression, supporting enhanced memory encoding when the distracting information is task-relevant (Biss et al., 2013). Young children also display poor distractor suppression due to the protracted development of SA. We thus examined whether young children’s memory can similarly benefit from task-relevant distracting information.

Experiment 1
Method. Eighty-seven 4-8-year-old children completed a memory-attention task with three phases: encoding, visual search, and retrieval. Children viewed multiple objects during encoding. Next, children searched for a target amongst 0, 5, 10, or 15 distractors. Search arrays remained visible for 3000 ms regardless of response time. Half of the encoding objects were included as “relevant” distractors during search. The remaining encoding objects (non-search objects) did not appear during the search phase. During retrieval children saw all objects from encoding and an equal number of novel objects and indicated whether they were old or new. We examined response time (RT) to detect the target during search (slower RT = less efficient SA) and the difference in recognition memory sensitivity (d’) for the relevant versus the non-search encoding objects.
Results. Older children showed more efficient SA (r = .71, p< .001) and better memory for relevant compared to non-search encoding objects (r = .37, p =.001). Multiple regression showed that search behavior following target detection was the only predictor of older children’s memory benefit for relevant objects (t(21)=2.82, p =.01). As a group, children  6 years showed no memory benefit for the relevant objects. However, within this younger age group, age and SA skills interacted to influence individual differences in the extent of memory benefit for relevant objects (t(33)=-2.93, p =.006). Specifically, the youngest children who also displayed poor SA showed a greater memory benefit for relevant objects than children of the same age with more efficient SA (Fig.1).

Experiment 2
Method. Thirty 7-8-year-old children completed the same task; however the search arrays disappeared immediately after target detection. This prevented participants from searching the arrays following target detection.
Results. Preliminary data indicate that, unlike Expt.1, children showed no memory benefit for the relevant distractors (t(21) = .62, p =.55), confirming that the memory benefit observed in Expt.1 can be attributed to search behavior after target detection (Fig. 2). Older children’s more mature SA abilities support more efficient target detection, making it difficult for them to learn from relevant distractors during search.

Discussion
These data indicated that children can benefit from relevant distraction during learning but the extent of this benefit depends on the interplay between children’s age and individual differences in selective attention skills. Future research will investigate whether the presentation of relevant distraction during educational instruction can improve learning outcomes for children with poor SA abilities.

Authors

• Jill King, Tulane Brain Institute
  Presenting Author

• Julie Markant, Tulane University
  Non-Presenting Author