Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Feb;226:105548. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105548. Epub 2022 Sep 17.
Cognitive control allows one to focus one's attention efficiently on relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information. This ability provides a means of rapid and effective learning, but using this control also brings risks. Importantly, useful information may be ignored and missed, and learners may fall into "learning traps" (e.g., learned inattention) wherein they fail to realize that what they ignore carries important information. Previous research has shown that adults may be more prone to such traps than young children, but the mechanisms underlying this difference are unclear. The current study used eye tracking to examine the role of attentional control during learning in succumbing to these learning traps. The participants, 4-year-old children and adults, completed a category learning task in which an unannounced switch occurred wherein the feature dimensions most relevant to correct categorization became irrelevant and formerly irrelevant dimensions became relevant. After the switch, adults were more likely than children to ignore the new highly relevant dimension and settle on a suboptimal categorization strategy. Furthermore, eye-tracking analyses reveal that greater attentional selectivity during learning (i.e., optimizing attention to focus only on the most relevant sources of information) predicted this tendency to miss important information later. Children's immature cognitive control, leading to broadly distributed attention, appears to protect children from this trap-although at the cost of less efficient and slower learning. These results demonstrate the double-edged sword of cognitive control and suggest that immature control may serve an adaptive function early in development.
认知控制使人们能够有效地将注意力集中在相关信息上，同时过滤掉不相关的信息。这种能力提供了快速有效的学习手段，但使用这种控制也会带来风险。重要的是，有用的信息可能会被忽略和错过，学习者可能会陷入“学习陷阱”（例如，习得性注意力不集中），即他们没有意识到自己忽略的信息具有重要意义。先前的研究表明，成年人比幼儿更容易陷入这些陷阱，但这种差异的机制尚不清楚。本研究使用眼动追踪技术来考察学习过程中注意力控制在陷入这些学习陷阱中的作用。参与者为 4 岁儿童和成年人，他们完成了一项类别学习任务，在该任务中，会突然发生一个转换，即最能正确分类的特征维度变得不相关，而以前不相关的维度变得相关。转换后，成年人比儿童更有可能忽略新的高度相关维度，并采用次优的分类策略。此外，眼动追踪分析表明，在学习过程中注意力选择性越强（即，只优化注意力集中在最相关的信息源上），则越有可能在之后错过重要信息。儿童不成熟的认知控制导致注意力广泛分散，这似乎使他们免受这种陷阱的影响——尽管这是以较低的学习效率和较慢的学习速度为代价的。这些结果表明认知控制是一把双刃剑，并表明不成熟的控制在发展早期可能具有适应性功能。
