A team of researchers has shown that children’s apparent inability to pay attention allows them to outperform adults when it comes to retaining information they were instructed to disregard.
The researchers’ study shows that, as expected, adults do a great job of focusing their attention on an assigned task and do not pay attention to information they are told to ignore.
Children, on the other hand, take in the secondary information they are instructed to ignore when given the same task. The information is then encoded in their brains.
“What we found is that children’s brains can hold information in a way that adults’ brains do not,” says Yaelan Jung, who worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of Toronto and in her current position as a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University.
Researchers used a series of four simple icons to test how well adults and children paid attention (image courtesy of Jung, Finn, et al.)
“Although it’s not a foreign idea that children have poorer attention abilities than adults, we did not know how this poor attention would impact the way their brains receive and hold other information,” she says. “Our study fills this knowledge gap and shows that children’s poor attention leads them to hold more information from the world than adults.”
In addition to Jung, the authors include: Tess Forest, who also contributed to the study as a graduate student at U of T and in her current position as a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University; and Dirk Bernhardt-Walther and Amy Finn – both associate professors in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of psychology.
“It’s not simply that children’s ability to pay attention is bad and they’re unable to disregard distractors,” says Finn. “Our study suggests that their brains are built to be sensitive to all information, regardless of whether it’s relevant or not – that kids are more sensitive to more information.
“Depending on your definition of childhood, humans are children for eight or nine years,” she says. “Compared to other species, that’s a long time and one explanation for such a lengthy childhood is that we humans have so much learning to do. Another is that it’s important for our IQ to take in as much information as we do. Still another is that we need to take in all this information as children in order to wire our brains properly, to develop the circuits and pathways for processing information.”
The study involved 24 adults with a mean age of 23 years and 26 children with a mean age of eight years. The team asked the participants to observe a series of four static illustrations: a bumble bee, a car, a chair and a tree. Each image was accompanied by a background of grey dots moving in one of four directions: up, down, left and right.
In one phase of the study, subjects were instructed to ignore the moving dots and press a button when an object – say, the bumblebee – appeared more than once. In another phase, they were asked to ignore the objects and press a button when the direction of motion of the dots was repeated.
Subjects carried out their task while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine at the Toronto Neuroimaging Facility at the University of Toronto. As they performed the task, the MRI measured the subjects’ brain activity which revealed how attention shapes what is represented in subjects’ brains.
“What we found in this study provides a novel way to think about what brain development means,” says Jung. “Often, we assume that as the brain develops it will do more and do things better. Thus, we often think that adults are better and smarter than kids. However, our work shows this is not always the case. Rather, children’s brains may just do things differently than adults – and consequently, they can sometimes do more than adults.”
Added Finn: “The study suggests that this approach of being more sensitive to the broader environment, at the cost of paying attention to specific things, is better for understanding complex systems. It may help form a higher level of understanding of our full environment.
“So, I look at kids as these little information-processing creatures better able to represent more of the world, with brains that more accurately reflect the world than ours.”
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
