Why Children Can’t Pay Attention to the Task at Hand

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by ScienceDaily.

Scientists have learned that children find it hard to focus on a task, and often take in information that won’t help them complete their assignment. But the question is, why?

In a new study, researchers found that this “distributed attention” 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 now appears that kids distribute their attention broadly, either 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 new research, Sloutsky and Wan 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.

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

Source: ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240826131209.htm