Dividing attention hurts learning in adults but not children
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it