Overturning Assumptions in Childhood Learning and Cognition

Marlie Tandoc played a number of musical instruments as a child. In particular, she remembered how she enjoyed learning new scales and committing their movements to muscle memory.

So, when she grew up and became an academic specializing in learning and memory, Tandoc was curious to revisit this period of life with a scientific lens. Although the bulk of research on how people learn new things focuses on adults, childhood “is way more interesting,” the University of Pennsylvania scientist said. 

“The kid’s brain is kind of a mystery,” she said. “So doing research with kids seemed very natural because so much learning happens at that time.” 

In fact, emerging research is showing just how differently a child’s brain learns compared to an adult brain. Understanding these differences can not only better inform the design of school curricula but also challenge assumptions and research methodologies focused on the study of children’s learning. 

“Patterns that are found for adolescents or adults may not necessarily hold in childhood,” said Lisa Bardach, a psychology professor at Justus Liebig University Giessen. “It’s a very special period. It’s really important to do research on children and their cognitive development.” 

Adaptive attention? 

A common complaint from teachers is students’ lack of attention. This was long thought to hamper learning: How could someone learn, take in information, and process it when they are constantly distracted? 

Tandoc, however, was interested in the upside of poor attention. Studies have shown that although kids consistently have poorer attention than adults, they also outperform adults when it comes to facets like language learning (Newport, 1990). 

“We know attention really shapes what’s coming into our brains, and kids have bad attention,” she said. “Maybe there’s a context where this bad attention might actually be a good thing.” 

Listen to the related podcast episode: Beyond Focus: How Attention Shapes Learning Differently for Children and Adults

In a 2024 study published in Psychological Science, Tandoc (then at the University of Toronto) and her colleagues recruited both college-aged adults and children ages 7 to 9 to complete a set of learning and memory games.

In the first experiment, the participants were shown a slideshow of drawings. They were directed to press a button every time a certain object, such as a bicycle or snowman, appeared. The participants were tested at the end, where each image they were told to pay attention to slowly revealed itself in fragments. The faster participants yelled out the object name, the better the measure of learning. With their attention directed, adults did better than children in this task. 

However, in a second experiment, participants were given the same slideshow but were told to ignore the pictures, paying attention instead to another task that had abstract yellow shapes. 

“What we found in this experiment was very different,” Tandoc said. “We found that adults and kids, they learned the drawings … equally well.” 

This finding, Tandoc noted, may support a broader theory in psychology: Although children’s brains are not as developed as adults, the setback may be adaptive in certain ways.

“If you don’t know what to pay attention to, it might just be best to take it all in,” Tandoc said.

Indeed, studies have shown that having more distributed attention, where a child is able to absorb the world around them and process multiple stimuli simultaneously, can drive them to be more curious, open-minded, and willing to explore new things (Blanco & Sloutsky, 2020; Blanco et al., 2023).

“Kids aren’t just like mini-adults, but they are very clearly perceiving, attending to the world in very different ways,” Tandoc noted. She recalled an anecdote from a mutual friend, who told her that while her older son was practicing reciting a poem, her younger son later recited the whole thing from scratch. 

So, children may not be always listening, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t learning. In fact, misdirected attention may be exactly what children need to take in critical information about the world around them. 

Child-friendly memory 

Another limitation to our understanding of childhood cognition could be in the methodology. In memory testing, it’s common to ask people to memorize something and then recall it. However, memory that we use in real life, for children especially, is more complicated than simple recall, said Yibiao Liang, a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt. 

Liang took on the challenge to investigate the intricacies of memory in kids. For a paper published in 2025 in Psychological Science, Liang and his colleagues examined children’s ability to switch between internal and external memory, a capacity that some researchers believed to be less developed at a young age. 

“Internal memory is more like when we are trying to keep that in our mind, which is not easy,” Liang said. He explained that it usually takes a lot of effort to use our internal memories to, for example, memorize someone’s phone number. That’s why most adults use external memories, like a phone contact list or notebook, to take down information. Children, especially those who were under 5 years of age, were assumed to not know which is better to use (O’Leary & Sloutsky, 2017). 

“They’re not really good at evaluating the difficulty or how much effort they need in the different tasks,” Liang said. 

To put this assumption to the test, Liang simulated a familiar experience for children—grocery shopping. He and his team created a shopping game, where 5- to 8-year-old participants from the United States and China memorized the information on the shopping list (internal memory) but could also refer to the shopping list (external memory) to get the required groceries.

On a separate version of the game, Liang introduced an additional cost to using external memory: He had the participants wait for a period of time before consulting the shopping list. If children couldn’t switch well between internal and external memory, or understand the difference between them, then they would spend the same amount of time memorizing the list in all versions of the task—regardless of the costly time lag. 

But the study found that “even the youngest one, even 5 years old, can do this kind of trade-off…quite well,” says Liang.

When asked which game they preferred, the children in this study said they preferred the version that had no waiting time. This indicates that children can evaluate “which one is harder, which in a sense to me, shows their ability to evaluate this difficulty [for internal memory] is actually quite good.”

The process also appears to be universal, Liang added, since he found no cultural differences in the participants’ performance. 

The universality of being able to switch between internal and external memory suggests that, in an educational setting, giving children access to external memory tools, like tablets, may not be detrimental. 

“Instead, teach them how to use them more wisely,” Liang said. Let children know that external memory may not always be accessible, which can potentially give them the opportunity to exercise that switch to the more difficult, resource-intensive internal memory, he added. 

Liang also noted the value of using more approachable methods to research children and their memories.

“Traditional methods [for studying memory], sometimes can be a little bit unnatural,” he said. “Make the method, and the paradigms, more realistic and more child-friendly … then we have a better chance to tap into their real ability.”

Beyond general intelligence 

Within cognitive research, scholars have long been interested in both general intelligence and more specific cognitive abilities. But how does the structure of a child’s cognitive ability change as they grow up? Within scientific literature, these changes are referred to as cognitive differentiation. And it is a subject of debate.

“What really sparked our interest in this particular topic were some inconsistencies in prior research on cognitive differentiation in childhood,” said Bardach. 

Bardach and colleagues noted that almost all of these past studies looked only at general cognitive ability. In a recent study published in Psychological Science, however, she and her colleagues looked at domain-specific cognition—how a child performs in specific domains such as math, science, or reading. 

“Children, especially when they go to school … really increasingly invest their cognitive abilities into learning in specific domains,” she said. So the hypothesis is that there “should be changes in the structure of factors that reflect these specific domains, and not changes in their general intelligence.” 

For the new research, Bardach investigated how general intelligence (referred to as g), changed as children grew older. But, most importantly, the study also assessed specific abilities like reading, writing, and science, in addition to executive function skills such as cognitive flexibility and working memory. 

“By taking a look at both—at g and at specific cognitive abilities—we can also gain a more nuanced picture of cognitive development in childhood,” she said. 

To do so, the team assessed a data set from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011 (ECLS:K-2011) from the United States. The participants comprised almost 18,000 children, who were assessed once or twice each year from kindergarten through fifth grade. The researchers then conducted a longitudinal analysis to investigate changes in the structure of cognitive abilities as the children grew. 

The results aligned with Bardach and colleagues’ hypothesis. For general intelligence, “the factor loadings remained relatively stable over the course of childhood,” she said, meaning that the structure of g didn’t change much with age. However, for most of the specific ability factors, these loadings increased with age.

“So that indicates that, rather than in the general cognitive abilities, there’s something going on with the specific cognitive abilities,” she said. 

The study also found that children with lower general cognitive abilities were able to partly compensate with higher cognitive abilities in specific domains. This means that children who struggle with general cognition can still find ways to perform well in specific academic subjects. This may help inform education: More personalized instruction and learning pathways could improve support for young students. 

The research needs to be replicated, however, before any concrete recommendations can be made, Bardach emphasized. Future research could follow children for a longer period of time to uncover the complex interactions between cognition, motivations, and environmental factors across developmental stages.

But for now, “it seems to really pay off to look beyond g in research on cognitive differentiation,” Bardach said. “Looking at this phenomenon from a different angle or different perspective is really valuable.”

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