How do Infants Direct their Attention when Learning in a Noisy Environment?

As children are still learning how to use their environment to their utmost advantage, they
are inherently more susceptible to the distracting stimuli around them. As such, they are often
tasked with determining which information in their noisy environment is important to focus their
attention on in order to learn. In a large survey conducted in schools around London, Shield and
Dockrell (2004) found that internal noise has a negative influence on early cognitive
development. Furthermore, in a literary review on the effect of noise on children's cognitive
performance, Klatte, Bergström, and Lachmann (2013) found an overall trend that background
noise negatively affects their attentional abilities. More specifically, children show both a deficit
in being motivated to deploy their attention, and of being capable of deploying their attention in
a tactical way in order to learn.
Though these studies have begun to address the effect of noise on infants' ability to select
and learn information, the distracting stimuli used are only moderately representative of a
naturally noisy environment. This is important to address, because if experiments are not
appropriately representing this noise, then the results will not correctly depict what impact this is
having on infants. In order to address the gap in the extant research, my current Master's
research project will test infants' cognitive performance while two ecologically valid
noises/distractors are present: 1) ambient environmental noise (e.g., background television
sounds) and, 2) more focused noise (e.g., several people talking at the same time). This paradigm
would serve as a pilot for what would be used in the currently proposed PhD research project.