Developmental Differences in Cognitive Control and Ignoring Distractions: Is it Always Good to Be Proactive?
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Nottingham
Department Name: Sch of Psychology
Abstract
Outline:
Distractibility in young children has been shown to impact both school readiness and academic attainment in later childhood but traditional and E-learning programs have failed to consider
how classroom distractions, can influence a child's ability to engage with learning . The most effective way to ignore distractions is to proactively plan-ahead but development of 'proactive
control' is still at present poorly understood. It is unclear at what age it is appropriate to use, or teach, this skill. This research will compare the costs and benefits of proactive control, in children and
young adults, using a modified cued-visual search task that has been pioneered by my supervisors.
Background:
Learning environments are surrounded by distractions, such as sounds and displays, that can hinder learning. Cognitive control refers to mental processes that help us to adjust our attention to
different situations; proactive control suppresses distractions before they appear, in order to stay focused, whereas reactive control is slower to engage and suppresses distractions after they appear.
Children transition from a mainly reactive to a mainly proactive mode of control at around 5-6 years. Although proactive control is more effective in adults and older children, counter-intuitively,
some research has shown that young children using proactive control were more distracted by an irrelevant task, than children who had not yet developed this skill [10]. This suggests that proactive
control may be too demanding for a young child's limited attentional resources. Evidence so far has not questioned the role of proactive control and distracter-suppression in young children. It has been assumed that if children are prompted to be proactive in the classroom, this will help their ability to focus. However, it is possible that encouraging proactive control too early may be counterproductive.
Significance:
This project will extend current knowledge and theories of cognitive control. Currently, teachers rely on instructions/prompts, but this has failed to prevent children from being distracted, reducing attainment in early and mid-childhood. Furthermore, E-learning programs have not considered how classroom distractions influence the ability to focus. By studying whether proactive control is
beneficial or costly to children, this can inform on what types of teaching strategies and E-learning programs should be used for these age-groups, as well as inform on how to improve these strategies.
Methodology:
There is a lack of age-appropriate measures to test proactive and reactive control in children. Research has used measures standardised for adults but if tasks are too demanding then this will tax attentional resources: young children may have behaved reactively because the tasks were too complicated. Older children's performance may have also been underestimated. This calls for modified measures to make direct comparisons between children and adults. A cued-visual search task has been modified and piloted with children. It shows how prompts can benefit or hinder search for a target item. Prompts will be used to assess the costs and benefits of being proactive vs. reactive across age.
Four studies will be undertaken to generate data for the project.
Distractibility in young children has been shown to impact both school readiness and academic attainment in later childhood but traditional and E-learning programs have failed to consider
how classroom distractions, can influence a child's ability to engage with learning . The most effective way to ignore distractions is to proactively plan-ahead but development of 'proactive
control' is still at present poorly understood. It is unclear at what age it is appropriate to use, or teach, this skill. This research will compare the costs and benefits of proactive control, in children and
young adults, using a modified cued-visual search task that has been pioneered by my supervisors.
Background:
Learning environments are surrounded by distractions, such as sounds and displays, that can hinder learning. Cognitive control refers to mental processes that help us to adjust our attention to
different situations; proactive control suppresses distractions before they appear, in order to stay focused, whereas reactive control is slower to engage and suppresses distractions after they appear.
Children transition from a mainly reactive to a mainly proactive mode of control at around 5-6 years. Although proactive control is more effective in adults and older children, counter-intuitively,
some research has shown that young children using proactive control were more distracted by an irrelevant task, than children who had not yet developed this skill [10]. This suggests that proactive
control may be too demanding for a young child's limited attentional resources. Evidence so far has not questioned the role of proactive control and distracter-suppression in young children. It has been assumed that if children are prompted to be proactive in the classroom, this will help their ability to focus. However, it is possible that encouraging proactive control too early may be counterproductive.
Significance:
This project will extend current knowledge and theories of cognitive control. Currently, teachers rely on instructions/prompts, but this has failed to prevent children from being distracted, reducing attainment in early and mid-childhood. Furthermore, E-learning programs have not considered how classroom distractions influence the ability to focus. By studying whether proactive control is
beneficial or costly to children, this can inform on what types of teaching strategies and E-learning programs should be used for these age-groups, as well as inform on how to improve these strategies.
Methodology:
There is a lack of age-appropriate measures to test proactive and reactive control in children. Research has used measures standardised for adults but if tasks are too demanding then this will tax attentional resources: young children may have behaved reactively because the tasks were too complicated. Older children's performance may have also been underestimated. This calls for modified measures to make direct comparisons between children and adults. A cued-visual search task has been modified and piloted with children. It shows how prompts can benefit or hinder search for a target item. Prompts will be used to assess the costs and benefits of being proactive vs. reactive across age.
Four studies will be undertaken to generate data for the project.
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES/J500100/1 | 01/10/2011 | 02/10/2022 | |||
| 1927745 | Studentship | ES/J500100/1 | 01/10/2017 | 17/04/2021 | Rumandeep Hayre |
| ES/P000711/1 | 01/10/2017 | 30/09/2027 | |||
| 1927745 | Studentship | ES/P000711/1 | 01/10/2017 | 17/04/2021 | Rumandeep Hayre |
| Description | The aim of this research is to understand attentional strategies we can use to help children in primary education to ignore eye-catching distractions. We often find that children are easily distracted which can hinder their learning in the classroom. Research shows adults can ignore eye-catching distractions when they are encouraged to plan-ahead or be proactive. Being proactive (or proactive control) allows users to use an instruction or cue (e.g. to pay attention to the teacher) provided at an early stage of processing, to guide their attention towards the relevant task (e.g. the teacher) and away from irrelevant distractions (e.g. a child making silly faces). Whereas reactive control does not use information early on to help us to plan-ahead, rather it guides attention at a late stage of processing and so it is theorised that we are more susceptible to being distracted using this strategy. Some research suggests that young children who are still developing proactive control, may find this strategy difficult on their limited cognitive capacities and so they may benefit more from a less demanding reactive strategy. This research aims to understand the age at which proactive control develops and whether children can benefit from using a proactive strategy to ignore eye-catching distractions in their environment. Findings - We carried out a research study with children aged 5-6, 9-11 and young adults where they used information which encouraged them to be proactive in a new computerised child-adapted attention task. From our research we have found that proactive control has developed by late-childhood; indeed 9-11-year-olds were found to use proactive control similarly to young adults. This suggests that by late-childhood, children have acquired an "adult-like" proactive control which provides new insights into this phenomena as past research suggested that an "adult-like" form of proactive control does not develop until adolescence. We also found that 5-6-year-olds have not yet developed proactive control which suggests that this skill is still developing. This contrasts with past research which has found that this ability has already developed by this age. Interestingly we found that both children and adults were unable to ignore eye-catching distractions and so they were unable to benefit from being proactive. This provides novel insights into whether a proactive strategy can influence our ability to ignore distractions, even in adults. Further Directions - One potential reason 5-6-year-olds were found to show no use of proactive control could be because they chose not to use this skill even though they had the ability to do so. It is possible that they require further encouragement to motivate them to be proactive; this is currently being investigated in an ongoing research study. It is possible that children and adults were unable to ignore eye-catching distractions because they reverted to using a reactive strategy at times. By failing to maintain proactive control, children and adults may have made themselves more susceptible to being distracted and so we are conducting further research into the conditions required to help them sustain this ability to ignore eye-catching distractions. |
| Exploitation Route | In everyday life, adults are able to be proactive by using instructions and cues in their environment to help them to plan-ahead. Traditional teaching strategies rely on the use of instructions to guide and focus children's attention. In this digital age, E-learning programs play an important role in education as their interactive nature provides a new way to motivate children to learn. However, a key issue in traditional and E-learning tools is how we can help children to stay focused and ignore classroom distractions. This research aims to help educational professionals acquire new insights into the type of strategies they can use in the classroom to encourage focus, especially for children in early- and late-childhood. This also motivates the use of E-learning programs in lesson plans by suggesting strategies which can help to solve issues of distraction when using these mediums in the classroom. In academia, this research has developed a child-adapted version of the cued visual search task. This task can allow us to compare attentional strategies in children and adults as well as conduct further study into the development of proactive control across the lifespan (an ongoing research study). |
| Sectors | Education |
| Description | School Training at a secondary school in Derbyshire - scheduled for July 2020 |
| Geographic Reach | Local/Municipal/Regional |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Title | Child-adapted Cued Visual Search Task |
| Description | We adapted the cued visual search task so that it can be used with children and adults to enable comparisons between both populations. In this computer task, participants are informed that they must locate a target hidden on the screen and press a button in response to it. Prior to this, they are provided with a cue (or clue) which may guide their attention towards or away from the location of the target. Our research findings have provided evidence to show that we can measure participants' ability to be proactive using this task as they show larger differences in their response times when they are provided with helpful as opposed to unhelpful cues (i.e. suggests participants are using cues/planning-ahead to guide their attention). We also modified this task by manipulating the instructions to have a storyline using cartoon characters to help children to understand the instructions and reduce the likelihood of fatigue effects which would vastly influence the results in an attention task. We are currently using this task in a research study for this award with children aged 5-11 years old, young adults (18-25 years old) and older adults (60+ years old). We have developed an updated version of this task which has made changes to the target the participants must search for. The aim of this study is to explore whether we can encourage young adults to maintain the ability to be proactive (and not revert from this strategy) to help them to ignore eye-catching distractions. We are currently collecting the data for this study. |
| Type Of Material | Physiological assessment or outcome measure |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | This task has been created and developed throughout this award. This has led to the Key Findings under the "Findings" subheading which has showed us the age at which the ability to be proactive (plan-ahead) has developed and whether we can use this ability to ignore eye-catching distractions (still under investigation). We are currently writing the paper for these research findings for publication. We are also currently comparing our measure of proactive control with a collaborator's measure of proactive control; data collection for this study is still ongoing. |
| Title | Behavioural Performance of Proactive Control |
| Description | For each research study we have carried out, we collect data on response times to search for a target on screen and their accuracy in finding this target. This dataset consists of data acquired from 5-6-, 9-11- and 18-25-year-olds. For ethical reasons, all data is anonymised so that it is not linked to the name of the participant. We are in the process of getting the research study, described in "Key Findings", published and so this dataset will be made available on open science framework. All current (and past) research studies are collecting the same type of behavioural data in a dataset and meet the regulations for GDPR. Once the findings have been analysed, we plan to make these datasets available on the open science framework. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2019 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | This dataset will further our understanding of how we can measure the ability to be proactive and how it develops. Also, the creation of this dataset means that it will become accessible to other researchers who may use it for conducting further analysis or helping them in understanding their research analysis if they had a similar research question to us. |
| Description | Task Replication |
| Organisation | Bordeaux Segalen University |
| Country | France |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Our research team has been in communication with a researcher doing similar research in the School of Psychology at Bordeaux Segalen University in France. We asked this researcher if we could replicate their computer task (AX-Continuous Performance task; measures proactive control) and compare it to our task (cued visual search task). We have been in communication to acquire the details of this task and are currently in the data collection phase of this study which is comparing proactive control in two different studies across the lifespan. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The researcher we worked with provided details about the her task and its revised editions so that we were able to re-create this task using different software in order to acquire a replication. By providing us with the approval to use her task in our research, we were able to explore our research questions in depth which will make a large contribution to this award. |
| Impact | We have been able to replicate the task using computer software (that was different to the original software) and now are currently in the data collection phase which is comparing this replicated task to our measure of proactive control with children (5-11 years old) and adults (18-25 & 60+ years old). This research study is still ongoing. |
| Start Year | 2019 |
| Description | Ambition Nottingham Brain Workshop - for prospective year 12 students |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 35 pupils in year 12 and from the midlands region, attended the Ambition Nottingham Brain sessions held at the University of Nottingham. The session which I hosted focused on understanding the development of attention across the lifespan. Students learnt about attention (what it is, how we measure it, how it develops) and engaged in group activities to increase their knowledge on this area. I presented my research and findings to the students so that they had greater awareness of attention in children and ways in which we can encourage them to be proactive. For both two hour sessions I ran in 2019 and 2020, I received excellent feedback from the students. The majority of students commented that they were interested in this research as they learnt something that they were not aware of before and some students commented that this session encouraged them to consider studying psychology at the undergraduate level. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019,2020 |
| Description | Core Maths in Psychology Workshop - aimed at year 10 students |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 200 pupils from the midlands region were invited to the University of Nottingham to learn about core maths, specifically how core maths is used in different fields and subjects (e.g. nursing, business, psychology). These students were in year 10 and were working below their target grade in maths and so these workshops were aimed to encourage them to explore the uses and importance of core maths in other subject areas. I hosted six workshops which explored how psychology uses core maths. In these workshops, they learnt about the definition of attention and they engaged in group activities to explore how we can measure attention (demo provided of the attention task created as part of this award). They also learnt about how to handle numbers and some basic statistics used in psychology. 20 teachers were also present during these workshops and so they were also able to engage in these activities with the pupils. Overall, the majority of students fed back that these sessions improved their awareness of this subject area as well as improved their understanding of how maths is used in psychology research. At the end of the sessions, students asked well-informed questions which showed their interest in this area and their aspiration to seek further information. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018,2019 |
| Description | Psychology Student Ambassador at Open Days |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I was a Psychology Student Ambassador for the University open days in 2017. I presented a 10 minute talk in four sessions about my experiences as a student at the University of Nottingham as well as how my course led me to do further research into the development of attention in my PhD. I communicated with prospective students and parents/carers in one-to-one interactions about the psychology course as well as future avenues in careers (e.g. academic and non-academic careers). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Summer Scientist Week - UoN public engagement event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Children aged 4-11 (N = 500) and their parents/carers were invited to take part in research studies aimed at children at the University of Nottingham. This public engagement event takes place for a one-week period during school holidays. I was able to collect data for a research study at this event as well as communicate this research with parents/carers in the form of posters and one-to-one discussions. This event was a great way to increase interest in this research with both children and parents/carers. I was then able to communicate the outcomes of the research study I ran at this event with parents/carers in the form of a newsletter which was shared on social media sites (i.e. Facebook & Twitter). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017,2018 |