News Finding: 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.
Paper Finding: The four experiments reported here show that hearing the name of an object improves 3-year-old children's ability to find that object in an array.
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: The pattern fits the hypothesis that labeling, by activating categoryspecific shape features of the target in visual working memory, resulted in faster performance with less repetition of the visual information. The four experiments reported here show that hearing the name of an object improves 3-year-old children's ability to find that object in an array. The effect of the object name in speeding children's performance in visual search was found in all experiments that manipulated labeling, with targets and distractors that varied in shape and color or that varied in shape alone, and when the target and distractors were of high and low discriminability.