Why can't children focus on a task? | Integrated Learning Therapy

Jeff Grabmeier, of The Ohio State University reports on a recent study motivated by the knowledge that children tend to struggle to focus on a task, often taking in information that won’t help them complete their assignment. This raised the question, why?

The researchers found that this wasn’t because children’s brains weren’t mature enough to understand the task or pay attention, and it wasn’t because they were easily distracted and lacked the control to focus.

It appears that youngsters pay attention to a broader distribution of information available. This might be because out of simple curiosity or because their working memory isn’t developed enough to complete a task without “over exploring.”

“Children can’t seem to stop themselves from gathering more information than they need to complete a task, even when they know exactly what they need,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

Sloutsky conducted the study, published recently in the journal Psychological Science, with lead author Qianqian Wan, a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State.

In this study, the researchers confirmed that even when children successfully learn how to focus their attention on a task to earn small rewards such as stickers, they still “over explore” and don’t concentrate just on what is needed to complete their assignment.

One goal of this study was to see if this was due to children’s levels of distractibility.

Part of the research involved four- to six-year-old children and adults. Participants were told they were going to identify two types of bird-like creatures called Hibi or Gora. Each type had a unique combination of colours and shapes for their horn, head, beak, body, wing, feet and tail. For six of the seven body parts, the combination of colour and shape predicted whether it was a Hibi or Gora with 66% accuracy. But one body part was always a perfect match to only one of the creatures, which both children and adults quickly learned to identify in the first part of the study.

In order to test whether children were easily distracted, the researchers covered up each body part, meaning the study participants had to uncover them one by one to identify which creature it was. They were rewarded for identifying the creature as quickly as possible.

For adults, the task was easy. If they knew the tail was the body part that was always matched perfectly with one of the two types of creatures, they always uncovered the tail and correctly identified the creature.

But the children were different. If they had learned the tail was the body part that always identified a creature perfectly, they would uncover that first—but they would still uncover other body parts before they made their choice.

“There was nothing to distract the children—everything was covered up. They could do like the adults and only click on the body part that identified the creature, but they did not,” Sloutsky said.

“They just kept uncovering more body parts before they made their choice.”

Sloutsky thought that another reason could be that children just like tapping on the buttons. So, in another study, they gave adults and children the opportunity to make just one tap on an “express” button to reveal the whole creature and all of its parts, or to tap on each body part individually to reveal it.

Children predominantly chose the express option to just tap once to reveal the creature to make their decision of what type it was. So, they weren’t just clicking for the fun of it.

Sloutsky will conduct future studies to investigate whether this unneeded exploration is simple curiosity. But he said he believes the more likely explanation is that working memory is not fully developed in children. That means they don’t hold information they need to complete a task in their memory for very long, at least not as long as adults.

“The children learned that one body part will tell them what the creature is, but they may be concerned that they don’t remember correctly. Their working memory is still under development,” Sloutsky said.

“They want to resolve this uncertainty by continuing to sample, by looking at other body parts to see if they line up with what they think.”

As children’s working memory matures, they feel more confident in their ability to retain information for a longer time, he said, and act more like adults do.

Future research should answer the question of whether the issue is curiosity or working memory, Sloutsky said.

More information: Qianqian Wan et al, Exploration, Distributed Attention, and Development of Category Learning, Psychological Science (2024). DOI: 10.1177/09567976241258146

Journal information: Psychological Science

Image supplied by Freepik.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.