A new study shows that children’s apparent inability to pay attention may actually allow them to outperform adults and retain information that they were told to discard in ways that adults can’t.
Investigators studied 24 adults -- average age of 23 -- and 26 children ranging from 7 to 9. Each was asked to observe a series of four illustrations: a bumblebee, a car, a chair, and a tree. The images were accompanied by a background of dots moving either up, down, left, or right.
When the researchers compared the accuracy of the children and the adults in both tasks, they found that the brains of the adults showed enhanced activity for the information they were asked to focus on. “This somewhat surprising result shows that attention works differently in children’s brains, likely allowing children to learn about facts that are not immediately relevant to a task,” said senior author Amy Finn, PhD, associate professor at the University of Toronto.
“Our study fills this knowledge gap and shows that children’s poor attention leads them to hold more information from the world than adults,” Jung stated.Finn says that the study doesn’t have any “direct implications” for children with ADHD who were not the focus of the researchers’ investigation. Talya Roth teaches “twice-exceptional” fourth and fifth graders who have both ADHD and autism. Roth has also found that giving students a spinner or allowing them to draw during lessons doesn’t detract from their ability to attend to the lesson material and may even enhance it.
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