ArticleDevelopmental psychology2019
Adaptive flexibility in category learning? Young children exhibit smaller costs of selective attention than adults.
Article in Developmental psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Development of Selective Attention in Children's Emotion Reasoning.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Working memory shapes information sampling and attention allocation across development.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Computational Approaches Reveal Developmental Shifts in Exploratory Play.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Algorithmic personalization of information can cause inaccurate generalization and overconfidence.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Reinforcement learning increasingly relates to memory specificity from childhood to adulthood.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Exploration, Distributed Attention, and Development of Category Learning.Psychological science · 2024Article
- "The eyes are the window to the representation": Linking gaze to memory precision and decision weights in object discrimination tasks.Psychological review · 2024Article
- Building a cumulative science of memory development.Developmental review : DR · 2024Article
- The Role of Attention in Category Representation.Cognitive science · 2024Article
- Auditory Category Learning in Children With Dyslexia.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2024Article
- From features to categories: The development of inductive generalization.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2023Article
- Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Auditory and visual category learning in children and adults.Developmental psychology · 2023Article
- The benefits of immature cognitive control: How distributed attention guards against learning traps.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2023Article
- Rapid infant learning of syntactic-semantic links.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- As within, so without, as above, so below: Common mechanisms can support between- and within-trial category learning dynamics.Psychological review · 2022Article
- Adolescent-specific memory effects: evidence from working memory, immediate and long-term recognition memory performance in 8-30 yr olds.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Why and How Did Narrative Fictions Evolve? Fictions as Entertainment Technologies.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Use of superordinate labels yields more robust and human-like visual representations in convolutional neural networks.Journal of vision · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Previous research has shown that when learning categories, adults and young children allocate attention differently. Adults tend to attend selectively, focusing primarily on the most relevant information, whereas young children tend to distribute their attention broadly. Although selective attention is useful in many situations, it also has costs. In addition to ignoring information that may turn out to be useful later, selective attention can have long-term costs, such as learned inattention-ignoring formerly irrelevant sources of information in novel situations. In 2 reported experiments, adults and 4-year-old children completed a category learning task in which an unannounced shift occurred such that information that was most relevant became irrelevant, whereas formerly irrelevant information became relevant. Costs stemming from this shift were assessed. The results indicate that adults exhibit greater costs due to learned inattention than young children. Distributing attention may be adaptive in young children, making them flexible to changing contingencies in the world and facilitating broad information gathering, both of which are useful when general knowledge about the environment is limited. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.