News Finding: "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," Vales, a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said in a recent statement.
Paper Finding: 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.
News Context: Cognitive scientists Catarina Vales and Linda Smith say that their findings open up new avenues for research into the way language shapes 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," Vales, a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said in a recent statement. "What we've shown is that in 3-year-old children, words activate memories that then rapidly deploy attention and lead children to find the relevant object in a cluttered array," said Smith, Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Paper Context: Within the limits of our measures with 3-year-old children (for whom 36 total trials is quite demanding), the results suggest that hearing a label quickly enabled children to more rapidly find the target object amidst distractors and that repeated visual exposures to the target more incrementally led children to just as rapid search. 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.