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.
It's a story as old as teaching. Young children staring off into space during class, seemingly oblivious to the lesson and anything else happening around them.
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.
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