Young Children are Sensitive to Task Context When Learning Predictive Patterns

Abstract

Previous research suggests that young children often fail to preferentially learn task-relevant over task-irrelevant information, suggesting they may learn the same thing regardless of the task context. To investigate this hypothesis, two hundred and ninety-five children ranging from four- to eight-years old learned to predict patterns of features (e.g., eyes, noses) of novel faces in four task contexts. Results demonstrate that young children do in fact tailor what they are learning to specific task demands. When tasks required participants to learn a single predictive pattern, they learned that one pattern well but not other equally reliable patterns (e.g., pick mouths given eyes, but not noses given hats). However, when tasks allowed or required attention to multiple patterns, only older children showed evidence of learning any of the patterns. Thus, for young children, focusing on one thing compromises their ability to learn other things, but trying to learn too much at once may mean learning nothing. These results demonstrate tradeoffs between broad and narrow learning, that may be especially severe for younger children.

Dividing attention hurts learning in adults but not children

“…In these experiments, children aged 4-6 years actually look a lot like adults, showing little to no learning of irrelevant information (Butler & Klein, 2009;Hoffman & Rehder, 2010;Rees et al, 1999, Rock & Gutman, 1981. Finally, the literature suggests that a third outcome is also possible: dividing attention could be so overwhelming that it prevents children from learning anything at all -as has been shown when 4-5-year-olds were asked to attend to multiple features that predicted an outcome as opposed to just attending a single feature (Kalish et al, 2018).…”