News — Children often surprise us with the details they remember—sometimes even better than adults! But what if their ability to learn comes not from focus, but from a broader, less selective attention? This episode unpacks research showing that while adults learn best when paying attention, children (ages 7-9) absorb information just as well, even when it’s irrelevant to their task. Could this be the secret behind their incredible learning abilities?
In this episode of Under the Cortex, host Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum speaks with Marlie Tandoc from the University of Pennsylvania who recently published an article on learning and attention in APS’s journal Psychological Science. Together they discuss whether children’s weaker selective attention is a hidden strength by addressing findings on attention, memory, and childhood learning.
Send us your thoughts and questions at [email protected].
Unedited Transcript
[00:00:07.860] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Children might not always focus on everything they encounter, but science tells us their selective attention works differently from adults. How does this affect their learning process? Join us as we explore children’s attention skills. I’m Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. Today, I have the pleasure of talking to Marlie Tandoc from the University of Pennsylvania. Marlie recently published an article on learning and attention in children in APS’s journal, Psychological Science. Marlie, welcome to Under the Cortex.
[00:00:42.760] – Marlie Tandoc
Thank you. Happy to be here.
[00:00:44.720] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Please tell us who you are and what type of psychologist you are.
[00:00:49.550] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah, for sure. I’m a cognitive psychologist. I’m currently studying at the University of Pennsylvania, though I’ve done work. The work I’m talking about today was at the University of Toronto in Canada. As a cognitive psychologist, I’m really interested in how people perceive, attend, learn, process information from the world. My particular expertise is in the area of cognitive development, so understanding how children, in particular, see the world and process information and learn things from their environment around them.
[00:01:22.540] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah, great. What initially got you interested in studying cognitive development?
[00:01:28.850] – Marlie Tandoc
I’d say I was always really interested in learning new skills. For example, when I was younger, I played a lot of different instruments, like piano, saxophone. I always found it really interesting. I’m like, How is the brain learning these completely new skills? I’ve always been interested in how we learn new things. I guess as I got older, I started doing some research in my undergrad on how adults learn. As adults, we learn a lot of new things, too. But I was like, Okay, if I’m interested in learning, I want to study children and how they learn because that’s when so much learning is happening during childhood. Everything is new. You have to learn language. You have to learn the way the world works. I was really like, Okay, if I’m interested in understanding how we learn, I need to study children. That’s what got me into the field.
[00:02:15.330] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah, very smart way of doing it. In your particular study that is published with APS, you talk about selective attention. Can you briefly tell us what selective attention is and how does it speak developing children, and why is it relevant to their learning abilities?
[00:02:36.790] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah, for sure. I’ll start by defining selective attention. Selective attention, we define as the ability to focus on information that’s relevant to our current goal or task. It’s also the ability to filter out and ignore information that’s not so relevant. For example, if we’re trying to read a book and there’s some background noise, I don’t know, maybe your partner is talking or there’s something on the TV, we want to be able to tune out that information, ignore it, and focus on our current goal or task at hand. For example, reading a book. It is thought that this ability of selective attention, we’re not born with It’s something that develops across childhood, especially between the ages of five to nine. But there’s also a lot of research being shown that selective attention isn’t fully developed until we’re adults. It’s something that takes a long time to develop compared to, say, something like language, which children can pick up very quickly. Selective attention, if you’re interested in learning like I am, it’s something really important because what we learn is what we pay attention to, is what is typically thought, in that if we’re selectively attending to something, we’re processing it more, so we’re able to learn that information better and later remember it better.
[00:03:52.760] – Marlie Tandoc
In the research I’ve conducted, we’re really interested in how children, because they have poor selective attention, how that might affect their ability to learn new information.
[00:04:03.990] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah, that is an important topic, but I would like to revisit something that you said in passing. You said we are not born with it. Can you tell us a little bit I want to learn about that?
[00:04:16.530] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah, for sure. I would say there’s studies showing that even infants are able to pay attention to things. They’re able to pay attention to different things in their environment, like their parents’ faces and so on. But what I mean by we’re not born with is that the neural system, so the parts of the brain that are important for selective attention, are not developed until adolescence and adulthood. These are the frontal lobes of the brain, so the front parts of the brain. That part of the brain is important for many things, but one of such things is selective attention. The brain is changing all throughout infancy and childhood, well into adulthood. We really have to consider how these neural changes in the brain are relating to our cognitive behaviors, in this case, selective attention.
[00:05:03.550] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah. You studied in your study selective attention through looking at task-relevant and irrelevant information. I have a specific question about that, if you don’t mind. You found that children learn task-relevant information better than adults. Why do you think that is and how did you test for that?
[00:05:26.730] – Marlie Tandoc
It was very interesting because it’s a surprising thing when children are able to learn something better than adults, especially in a lab setting. There are cases which maybe we’ll talk about later, like language or skill learning. But here, what we were really interested in is, okay, so kids are easily distracted. We know they have trouble focusing. Their selective attention is not as good. Could that actually be beneficial for learning for them, or is it just a detriment? In this study, what we found is that kids actually learn information that’s not relevant, at least to the current goal, better than adults. I think to explain that a bit better, I’ll talk just very briefly about what we did. We had children and adults come into the lab. The kids were 7-9 years old, and they were looking at these slideshows of images. They had to just… We were like, Hey, pay attention to these images. They were like drawings of snowman or a truck or a banana. We’re like, Hey, pay attention to these. They’re important. Then after, we did a test with them where they saw fragments of these images appear, and they had to say as quickly as possible what that image was.
[00:06:33.410] – Marlie Tandoc
They’d be like, they’d see some lines and be like, Oh, that’s a snowman, I think, and so forth. Adults did that better than kids, which is not surprising. Adults are able to focus, hone in on the task, and do it well. But what is The funny thing is in a second experiment, we got another group of kids and adults, and we had them do the same thing, but now we manipulated that there was some information that was task-relevant and task-e-relevant. In this experiment, those drawings became task-e relevant. Instead, the participants were told to pay attention to these yellow shapes that had nothing to do with the pictures, but we were like, Hey, pay attention to these shapes. Press a button every time one repeats. They were like, Ignore the drawings. They’re not helpful. Then what we found there is that children learn these drawings better than adults, even though they were told not to pay attention to it, at least shortly in periods shortly after learning. What was the main finding we found is that across those experiments, adults, they did way better when we were like, Hey, pay attention to these drawings. But kids, they learn the drawings equally well in both experiments.
[00:07:36.510] – Marlie Tandoc
Regardless of that instruction, they would just learn it anyways, like a sponge. They were just taking it all in. They were learning that task irrelevant information to get the information better.
[00:07:46.510] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
They seem to learn just as well when they are asked to ignore information, compared to when they are asked to focus on it. How do you think about that? Do you think it’s a superpower?
[00:08:01.710] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah, a superpower is interesting. I think it is, personally. I think a lot of the time we think about all these downsides of having poor selective attention. Like fidgeting or getting distracted when you’re trying to do homework. But I think we need to step back and think about what children are trying to do. What is their learning goal? For children, the goal is to learn broadly from the worlds because when we enter the world, we don’t really know how it works. Famous psychologist William James said that when infants enter the world, everything’s like a blooming, buzzing confusion. What he meant by that is that they come into the world and everything’s a blur because we don’t have concepts, we don’t have words yet. For children, it’s really important to just take in everything from the environment so that they can learn how the world works. I think in that sense, it is a superpower having this ability to just learn from everything. Because imagine if children didn’t do that and they had very strong selective attention. Maybe accidentally, they would just be paying attention to things that are not relevant at all, ever. It seems like it’s actually very smart and adaptive for children’s learning systems to just take in a bunch of information and then as they learn how the world works, later they can hone in on those more selective attention skills and using their goals to guide their behaviors.
[00:09:24.010] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
You mentioned language very briefly. How do your findings is fit with previous research on children’s ability to pick up languages faster than adults?
[00:09:36.930] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah, it always surprises me how quickly children can learn language, whereas if I try to learn a language, I just struggle with it a lot. For the record, we did not study language in this study. We studied children and adults’ memory of images. But attention, we think selective attention operates across multiple modalities. What I mean by that is we can pay attention to to different linguistic cues or to different speech patterns that people are using. If kids have this broader selective attention, they’re just taking everything in, that might be why they can learn language without even trying. Again, this is speculative because we would need to We could test this. This could be something that someone could test in an experiment. I speculate now, but maybe this ability to learn broadly from the environment might be why children are just… They can just hear, take everything in, and that might help them learn language.
[00:10:32.360] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
I’m a mom. I have a nine-year-old, and I’m very interested in the following question because when I talk to my child, she’s also doing a million things at the same time. I I’m sometimes not sure if she’s paying attention. I guess your study gives us an answer. It shows that children are less impacted by attentional instruction than adults. How does this change our understanding of child learning?
[00:10:59.950] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah. I think if there’s one lesson to take away from it is that children are seeing and attending to the world very differently than we are. Children, especially now, with all the different types of technology and games and YouTube, they’re doing a lot at the same time, it seems. I think what our research says about children’s learning is that they’re not paying attention in the ways we do, and that even if they’re paying attention to one thing, they might be absorbing more from their environment. I do want to say, though, that there might be certain types of learning that might benefit from selectively attending, maybe doing, say, math homework. We don’t know yet. I feel like if there’s a lot of distractions, maybe that wouldn’t necessarily help. So I think understanding the limits of the attention is important. But for now, I would just say that kids are taking in a lot from their environment. A story I have that a mother told me as well is I told this one of my friends’ moms about this research I did, and she was telling me a story about her son. She had two sons, and the younger son was my friend, and then the older son was practicing a poem for school.
[00:12:09.910] – Marlie Tandoc
Every day, he’d come home and practice this poem because he had to present it at a talent show. And Actually, the younger son was just coloring or watching TV. The mom said she was surprised. She’s like, Your research explains this because my younger son, one day, he just came up to me and recited this whole two-minute poem. I didn’t even know he was paying attention to the older sibling practicing. That’s an example of how kids might be taking in more from their environments than we’re thinking, and maybe even without trying or while doing something else.
[00:12:42.750] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah, they are like little spies, it sounds like from your example.
[00:12:47.110] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah, I like the sponge analogy.
[00:12:49.320] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
When we go back to your study, there’s a section that you talk about priming, and I would like to ask a specific question about that part. You You mentioned that children are primed by task irrelevant information. What does that mean and how does it influence their learning?
[00:13:09.700] – Marlie Tandoc
Priming is a certain type of memory. I study a lot of memory. A lot of people think memory is just a single thing like, Oh, I remember going to the grocery store yesterday with my partner. But there’s actually many different types of memory. For example, that’s an episodic memory, but we also have semantic memory. Our of facts and knowledge about the world. Priming is another type of memory. What priming is, is it’s how things we encounter can later affect how we respond to things, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. In that experiment I mentioned where participants were told to pay attention to the yellow shapes, the line drawings were just presented in the background. They were hard to see. They appeared flashed very quickly, so you couldn’t really fully process it. In other words, we prime them with those images. In the test where we tell them to identify these fragmented drawings as quickly as possible, that’s called a measure of priming because oftentimes, they see these fragments, they don’t really know maybe that it’s going to be a snowman up, but they just have this hunch that it is a snowman, and they label it as a snowman.
[00:14:20.080] – Marlie Tandoc
It’s this ability to that we can, even if we see something very briefly and we’re not maybe paying attention to it, we’re still absorbing it and processing it at some level. What we meant by when I wrote that sentence is that we show that this effect of learning about task-relevant information is true, at least in the context of priming, so this one type of memory. This leaves open the possibility that maybe there’s different types of information, maybe language or learning math. We don’t know for sure yet if children would learn similarly or differently in those contexts. This is the first study to show, though, that this learning of task-relevant information for children is true in the case of priming.
[00:15:03.210] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah. How do you think children’s broader capacity for learning task irrelevant information impacts their cognitive development as they grow older?
[00:15:16.210] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think it really comes back to that whole idea I was talking about earlier, where for children, it’s actually really smart to employ this broader capacity to learn because it lets you just learn more from your environment. Then later on, as your selective attention system is mature, then you can take all that knowledge you learned about of how the world works in a broad sense and maybe hone it into skills and goals that are relevant to you as you’re older Yeah, I think there’s a lot of work that I haven’t done this work, but some work tracks children longitudinally over time to see how attention ability earlier in childhood might relate to later metrics, later in life. I’m not an expert in that area, but it would be It’s really interesting, I think, to see how children’s attention earlier on might affect outcomes later on in life.
[00:16:08.660] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah. What about educational settings? Given that children’s learning isn’t as influenced by attentional direction, how might this affect the way we design educational environments for them?
[00:16:21.880] – Marlie Tandoc
I think that’s a super cool question that I really hope people start considering when they’re designing educational curriculum or even the way a classroom is laid out. I certainly want to say that this finding that we found is we found it for this one type of memory priming and in this very particular context. But in a classroom, there’s a lot more things going on. There’s definitely work showing that if there’s too much distracting information in a classroom environment, that is actually detrimental to children’s ability to pay attention to the lesson. But these were cases where the environments were not relevant to what they were learning. You You could imagine a scenario where you could have a classroom environment where, let’s say, the lesson was learning about rainforests or something like that. But in a round, you had some more fun, immersive rainforest decor or some different information posters around the room. I don’t know, something like that. In that scenario, maybe that more immersive environment, children might learn better because if they’re taking everything in broadly, there’s a lot of redundant information about that. What I’m saying is maybe Maybe classrooms could be designed or maybe education curriculum could be designed to take advantage of that and let children learn from multiple different sources around them.
[00:17:42.070] – Marlie Tandoc
That might be a way that children could learn better. It reminds me of there’s a big literature in development on how children play and explore the world differently. Children, they love to play. They’re so curious. That seems to make sense with a story that they need to learn a lot. Just the ability to learn and play and explore things in the environment, that might be a very natural way kids learn, and maybe we should leverage that in educational environments. I talked a lot about kids, but I think on the flip side, our research might also say something about adults. For adults, it’s very clear that a goal is important. Task instruction and having a clear goal are very important for what we learn and do not learn. Maybe for adults, in our case, we are testing college-aged adults. Say for a lecture, having a very clear goal or outline at the beginning of the lecture to tell adults what to pay attention to, that might be the most beneficial for their learning.
[00:18:42.300] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
I think we should allow children to use their natural skills when we think about learning. It is okay that they are different from adults. I think it is time for us to understand that and embrace that. This is a great piece of evidence in the right direction in this research. What future research directions do you see for better understanding the relationship between selective attention and learning in both children and adults?
[00:19:15.570] – Marlie Tandoc
I think one of the things that it would be really important is, and I’ve touched a little bit on this earlier, but just understanding, okay, what kinds of task-relevant information do children learn? For example, learning images or objects as we tested here, learning these line drawings. But what about language or maybe something like math or learning a new skill? I think future research should get kids and adults, like we did, and have them do these different types of learning and see if it is also true that kids are learning that extra information better. I think just understanding the scope of this effect and where it generalizes or where it does not generalize, is something really important for future research to do. I’m currently doing a lot of neuroscience work in my PhD, so using functional magnetic resonance imaging while people are trying to learn and remember. I’d be really interested for future research to look at what parts of the brain are important to this and what is happening there. Because I think the more that we can connect what’s happening in the brain and this development of the frontal lobes to these different attention and learning phenomenon, the more understanding will have of how brain structure actually gives rise to these different things, which can have really important implications for understanding, say, learning in different populations, say, children with attention deficit disorders or children on the autism spectrum, where it’s very relevant.
[00:20:48.150] – Marlie Tandoc
This is a little bit of a tangent, but I think future research could look at this is there’s one study I came across recently I found where they had neurotypical children, but also children on the autism spectrum, learning irrelevant and irrelevant information. They found that children on the spectrum, they learned irrelevant information better. I thought that was really relevant, actually. But they also learned the relevant information just as well as the neurotypical children. I think this, again, is suggesting that having extra information isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Children’s brains and maybe different populations, they might be learning in very different ways that we really do need to try to understand, especially in order to create education systems that can best help people learn.
[00:21:34.210] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah, great suggestions for the future. I’m very excited about to hear more about that neuroscience research. Please contact us when you have more data in your research program. My final question, is there a key takeaway or a final thought that you would like to leave with our listeners?
[00:21:53.940] – Marlie Tandoc
A lot of us have children in our lives, whether our own kids, our family members, I think just to know that kids are seeing the world in a very different way than we do. If we’re getting frustrated with how distracted they’re getting or inability to pay attention, it might be important to step back and recognize that that very thing that you think might not be helpful, might actually be a good thing for them, and that it’s what might have been letting them learn very broadly about their worlds and take it all in. I think a general lesson we can learn from kids is as adults, we’re going through life, and our selective attention means we’re ignoring so much. Sometimes I like just personally, I’m just going to pay attention to everything around me, like the color of the trees today or this really cute dog walking by me. I think we can learn from kids and realize we’re actually not ignoring a lot of things that we might ought to pay attention to. I think there’s something that we can learn from kids here and how we learn and be the world.
[00:22:53.500] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
Yeah. Marlie, this was a pleasure. Thank you very much for sharing your time with us today.
[00:23:00.740] – Marlie Tandoc
Yeah, of course. Thank you so much. I had a lot of fun.
[00:23:03.760] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum
This is Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with APS, and I have been speaking to Marlie Tandoc from the University of Pennsylvania.
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