Learning with multisensory cues throughout childhood

Educational materials that combine sights and sounds appear stimulating and engaging to an adult educator, but may actually be confusing and overwhelming to a young learner. Our research program will identify when and where children have difficulty with multlimodal information, and help develop materials that are tailored to their cognitive and perceptual development.

Our world is noisy and distracting, filled with a multitude of sights and sounds; the television is on while we talk on the phone, there are street sounds as we navigate a map, and people talking to each other as we try to attend to a specific conversation. To walk into a toy shop is to be overwhelmed with sights, sounds, and even smells. Clearly, children are stimulated and excited by information from multiple sensory modalities. But what is best for their learning? Research from psychology has shown that adults learn better if they are given information in different sensory modalities at the same time. This fact has been used as the basis for many childhood educational programs in literacy and numeracy. But there has been no systematic investigation into whether children learn better from information presented in different sensory modalities. Or if, in fact, there are individual differences in this ability. To take advantage of multimodal stimuli a learner has to be able to pay attention to one thing and not another, and to switch attention when required. These sophisticated skills - inhibitory control, selective attention and cognitive flexibility - are developed slowly throughout the course of childhood, and some children develop slower than others. Our preliminary results show that, as a consequence, children can struggle to learn from multimodal information.

Our research will bring to light how multimodal learning approaches can be effectively used, given the age and the individual learning ability of the child. This will impact researchers, educators, parents, and toy designers alike.

This project has direct academic and societal impact.

We have identified fours groups of people who will benefit from our research, and we have timescales in place that will allow for realisation of these benefits throughout the 36 months of the grant, and directly afterwards.

1. The general public: We aim to present our findings to parent groups, and the general public at public science lectures and organised school events. The PI (Kirkham) and the co-PI (Mareschal) have connections with several london schools, which will be provide outlets for dissemination.
2. Educators: Primary school teachers will benefit directly from this research; understanding both the general usefulness of multisensory approaches to learning and the individual differences in this usefulness will increase the potency of current teaching techniques.
3. Designers of educational toys or technologies: Given the growing educational toy industry, results pertaining to learning through different modalities will be of utmost interest to toy designers and researchers.
4. Academics in psychology and related fields: Our results will be of great benefit to researchers in educational, and
cognitive psychology who have studied children's ability to integrate across different modalities. In addition, this research will be of interest to child clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, when considering the potential benefits of multisensory approaches to children struggling with canonical learning techniques.

Our project aims to bring different research areas together. We will seek to make contact with these researchers by continuing to publish our results in prominent, cross discipline journals such as 'Psychological Science'. We also plan to promote our research at both general and discipline specific conferences.