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 and adjudicates between two ways that attention could drive developmental differences in memory. One possibility is that children have a more '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 enhance 'distractor' memories, 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 tendency to prioritize distractors in memory more than adults. Furthermore, relevant and irrelevant information from the same event were associated in adults' memory but not children’s memory. Moreover, unlike adults, children learned about targets and distractors from different events, suggesting their attention is more likely to dart across items. Children’s darting attention may therefore explain why children remember “distracting” information better than adults.