Children's Darting (Not Diffuse) Attentional Spotlight Reduces Memory Selectivity for Relevant Content

Why do children remember distracting details better than adults? This could be a silver lining-a benefit-of children's immature attention. The present work establishes this link between immature selective attention and children's broader learning. Furthermore, it adjudicates between two ways that immature attention could drive children's broad learning. One possibility is that children have a "diffuse" attentional spotlight, meaning irrelevant information "leaks" into long-term memory as children learn about relevant information. Alternatively, children's attention might dart between relevant and irrelevant information across time. While both mechanisms would broaden learning, only diffuse attention would facilitate memories for relevant and irrelevant information from the same event and associations between them. In a sample of children and adults (n = 130), we find clear evidence that immature attention underlies children's reduced memory selectivity for relevant content. Furthermore, relevant and irrelevant information from the same event were associated in adults' memory but not children's. We also observed that children learned about targets and distractors from different events, a pattern consistent with the idea that children's attention is more likely to dart than diffuse across items. Children's immature and darting attention may, therefore, explain why they remember "distracting" information better than adults.