Grown-ups, it turns out, can channel their inner child more easily than one might think, especially when their brains are bogged down with extra tasks. A study from The Ohio State University reveals that overloading the working memory of adults makes them scatter their attention and behave much like kids, according to a report published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General via Ohio State News.
The research was led by Vladimir Sloutsky, a psychology professor at Ohio State, and Qianqian Wan, a former doctoral student at the same institution. They postulated that children, and now adults under cognitive strain, display a lack of focus because their working memory isn’t fully developed. This deficiency inhibits their ability to maintain attention on the task at hand, instead causing the approach of "over exploring". "We made it difficult for adults to focus by filling their working memory with things that weren’t relevant to what they were trying to accomplish," Sloutsky told Ohio State News.
In an experiment involving both 5-year-old children and 71 adults, participants were asked to collect virtual candy from alien creatures in a computer game, without knowing which creature provided the most. Some adults were tasked with an additional challenge: to keep track of a series of numbers and voice the second odd number when two appeared consecutively, a ploy designed to strain their working memory. Despite learning which creature gave out the most candy, both the children and overloaded adults continued to select other creatures.
"Importantly, like in children, this scattered attention was observed, despite high levels of task accuracy," Wan said in a statement obtained by Ohio State News. This suggests successful learning can happen alongside a broadened attention span. The researchers asked all participants if they could identify the highest reward-giving creature and found that their responses were above-chance accurate, reflecting that learning happened despite the distributed focus.
The implications of these findings are particularly relevant for educational strategies tailored towards children. A sufficiently resourced working memory, according to the study, is key to forming "attentional maps," which help individuals prioritize and sample information efficiently. But if those resources are stretched thin, a person’s attention lacks a focused target, mirroring children's patterns of learning and engagement. "These findings could inform teaching strategies that work with, rather than against, young children’s natural learning tendencies," as per Ohio State News, Wan proposed, foreseeing the potential to leverage this understanding in educational environments.
The study does not just shed light on children's learning behaviors but also on how adults might operate under pressure or multitasking conditions. By recognizing the parallels between children’s distractibility and adults' responses under heavy cognitive loads, these Ohio State University researchers have opened a window into the mechanics of attention and memory—elements that are foundational to human learning and performance.
