Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.
Dev Sci. 2018 Mar;21(2). doi: 10.1111/desc.12554. Epub 2017 Apr 26.
Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty-one children aged between 6 and 10 years participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT). Participants were asked to respond to the presence of a target stimulus whilst ignoring distractors. Correct target selection resulted in the movement of the target exemplar to either the upper left or right screen quadrant, according to category membership. Category membership was defined either by visual-only, auditory-only or multisensory information. As early as 6 years of age, children demonstrated greater performance on the incidental categorization task following exposure to multisensory audiovisual cues compared to unisensory information. These findings provide important insight into the use of multisensory information in learning, and particularly on incidental category learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development will be discussed.
多感官信息已被证明可以通过增强刺激的无模态属性来调节婴儿的注意力并促进成年人的学习。然而，目前尚不清楚这是否适用于整个儿童中期的多感官环境中的学习，特别是在偶然学习的情况下。本研究共有 181 名 6 至 10 岁的儿童参与了一项新的多感官注意学习任务（MALT）。要求参与者在忽略干扰物的情况下对目标刺激的存在做出反应。正确的目标选择会根据类别成员关系将目标范例移动到屏幕左上或右上角的象限。类别成员关系由仅视觉、仅听觉或多感官信息定义。早在 6 岁时，与接触单感官信息相比，儿童在接触多感官视听线索后，在偶然分类任务上的表现更好。这些发现为学习中多感官信息的使用提供了重要的见解，特别是在偶然的类别学习方面。将讨论在整个发展过程中在教育中部署多感官学习任务的意义。
