Possibly due to difficulties with maintaining focus, children have been shown to learn distracting information better than adults. To get at the cause of this developmental reversal, the present investigation explores the role of task-goals. Both children (7-9 years) and adults viewed drawings of common objects and were either told to look at the drawings (Experiment 1) or indicate when shapes (overlaid on the drawings) repeated (Experiment 2), after which they were asked to identify fragments of these and novel drawings as fast as possible. As expected, adults learned much better than children when drawings were task-relevant (Experiment 1). This difference disappeared, however, when the drawings were task-irrelevant (Experiment 2), with children showing better learning than adults in the first half of the test. Comparing across experiments, we observed that while adult learning was hampered by the addition of a concurrent task in Experiment 2, child learning was not. These findings demonstrate fundamental differences in how goals shape attention and learning in children versus adults.