Researchers are getting closer to understanding why children struggle to focus on tasks.
A recent study found that this “distracted attention” is not because children’s brains are not mature enough to understand tasks or focus, nor is it due to their tendency to be easily distracted or a lack of control in concentrating.
Children are Easily Distracted
Currently, it seems that children distract themselves broadly simply out of curiosity, or because their working memory has not developed sufficiently to complete a task without “over-exploring” the surroundings.
“Children seem unable to stop themselves from gathering more information than necessary to complete a task, even when they know exactly what they need,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and a psychology professor at Ohio State University.
Sloutsky conducted this research, recently published in the journal Psychological Science, alongside lead author Qianqian Wan, a doctoral psychology student at Ohio State University.
Sloutsky and his colleagues have previously conducted several studies noting how children broadly distract their attention and appear incapable of completing tasks as effectively as adults by ignoring what is irrelevant to their goals.
In this new study, Sloutsky and Wan confirmed that even when children succeed in learning to focus on a task to earn small rewards like stickers, they still “over-explore” and do not concentrate solely on what is necessary to complete the task.
One goal of this research was to see whether children’s susceptibility to distraction could be an explanation.
Underdeveloped Working Memory in Children
Chinese children in class – (Photo credit: AFP)
The study included children aged 4 to 6 years old and adults. They were asked to identify two species of bird-like creatures named Hibi or Gora. Each species had a unique combination of colors and shapes for its horns, head, beak, body, wings, legs, and tail.
For six out of seven body parts, the combination of color and shape helped predict whether it was Hibi or Gora with 66% accuracy. However, one body part always completely matched one of the creatures, which both children and adults quickly learned to identify in the initial phase of the study.
To test if children were easily distracted, the researchers covered each body part, which meant participants had to explore each part one by one to identify the creature. They would be rewarded for identifying the creature as quickly as possible.
For adults, this task was quite simple. If they knew the tail was the body part that always completely matched one of the two creatures, they would always open the tail and correctly identify that creature. But children were different. If a child knew the tail was the body part that always matched one creature, they would open the tail first – but they would still open other body parts before making their choice.
“There was nothing to distract the children – everything was covered. They could act like adults and just select the body part identifying the creature, but they didn’t do that. They kept exploring other body parts before making their selection,” Sloutsky said.
Future studies will investigate whether this unnecessary exploratory behavior is purely curiosity, Sloutsky noted. But he thinks a more likely explanation is underdeveloped working memory in children. This means they do not retain the necessary information to complete a task in their memory for a long time, at least not as long as adults do.
“Children have learned that one body part will tell them what the creature is, but they may worry that they do not remember accurately. Their working memory is still developing,” Sloutsky said.
