News Finding: Language, the study suggests, is transformative: More so than images, spoken language taps into children's cognitive system, enhancing their ability to learn and to navigate cluttered environments.
Paper Finding: In this way, and as shown in Experiments 3 and 4, the effect of labeling does not mimic the effect of target and distractor discriminability but does mimic the effect of repeated presentations of the visual target, with labeling accomplishing at the outset what repeated visual presentations accomplish only after some number of repetitions.
News Context: Language, the study suggests, is transformative: More so than images, spoken language taps into children's cognitive system, enhancing their ability to learn and to navigate cluttered environments. As such the study, published last week in the journal Developmental Science, opens up new avenues for research into the way language might shape the course of developmental disabilities such as ADHD, difficulties with school, and other attention-related problems. "If the name of the target object was also said, the children were much faster at finding it and less distracted by the other objects in the scene," said Vales, a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Paper Context: Within the limits inherent to collecting RT data from 3-year-old children, the pattern to be explained is this: Labeling affected overall search time as measured by the intercept but did not affect the additional cost of each added distractor. In this way, and as shown in Experiments 3 and 4, the effect of labeling does not mimic the effect of target and distractor discriminability but does mimic the effect of repeated presentations of the visual target, with labeling accomplishing at the outset what repeated visual presentations accomplish only after some number of repetitions. Such an effect would lead to faster overall search.