Psychologists have found that children learn even when they “don’t notice anything”

Are you a parent or teacher frustrated that your kids aren’t paying attention to you when you’re trying to teach them something? Don’t feel bad, say psychologists at the University of Toronto.

A new study from the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has found that children learn equally well whether they are trying or not, while adults, on the other hand, tend to ignore information they aren’t paying attention to.

The findings are reported in a new paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

“Don’t be angry at the kid who jumps around while you’re reading a book,” said senior study author Amy Finn, an assistant professor of psychology who heads the Learning and Neural Development Lab. “He is likely still listening and learning, even though it looks different”.

In the study, a team of scientists that included Tandoc University alumni Marley Tandoc, Bharat Nadendla and Theresa Pham tested how well children and adults internalized drawings of common objects after two different experiments.

In the first, participants were asked to pay attention to the drawings. In the second, participants were asked to disregard the drawings and perform a completely different task. After each scenario, participants had to identify as quickly as possible the fragments of the drawings they had seen.

Researchers found that children learned equally well from the drawings in both scenarios, while adults learned more when they were asked to pay attention to the drawings – in other words, children’s learning was not negatively affected by not paying attention to the information they were being tested to learn.

Children’s selective attention, or their ability to focus on and away from a specific task, develops slowly and does not fully mature until early adulthood.

Previous research has shown that, unlike adults, children’s brains perceive information they are told to pay attention to as well as information they are not told to pay attention to. This is probably one of the reasons why children are so good at picking up the languages spoken around them.

“As adults, we really filter what we’re learning through our goals and task demands, whereas children absorb everything regardless – seemingly without even trying,” says Tandoc,  former head of the Learning and Neural Development Laboratory and a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania.

While returning to a childlike learning state may seem appealing, selective attention does have a number of benefits. Experiments have found that attention training improves learning performance in adults. In other words, adults learn better when they are told what information is most important.

The research may affect how parents, teachers, and educational program developers think about the way children and adults learn. For example, for children, the research findings emphasize the benefits of play and immersive learning. For adults, setting a clear objective or goal at the beginning of a class or workshop is important for learning outcomes.

“When I interact with my five-year-old, I worry less than I used to about whether he’s internalizing something if he doesn’t seem to be paying attention,” Finn shares.

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Published: 22.01.2025

Updated: 22.01.2025

Medical author, Medical editor:

Stepan Yuk

Medical expert:

PhD. Olexandr Voznyak