Richards, J.E. (2002). Getting distracted from the main task: Infants and preschoolers watching TV! International Society for Infancy Studies, Toronto, CA.
The “distractibility” phenomenon is characterized as a competition between a central task and a competing secondary task. Several studies have shown that when young children are watching interesting TV programs that they engage in extended looking indicating increasing attention engagement. This looking is accompanied by increased memory for scenes, relative indistractiblity from looking away from the TV, heart rate changes indicating progressive attention engagement, and increased comprehension of TV content. Watching TV is a “primary task” to which attention is directed and irrelevant secondary events are ignored.
Recently, it was shown that infants and young preschoolers, ages 6 to 26 months, are harder to distract from a children’s movie (“Follow that Bird”) when looking and heart rate measures indicated attention is directed to the television. There were two findings. First, the longer a look was in progress, the longer the distraction latency and the less likelihood that the distractor was localized. Second, the heart rate changes occurring at the time of distractor onset moderated this influence. The period immediately before distractor onset had a larger sustained lowered heart rate for the trials on which the children continued looking at the center TV monitor than for the trials on which the children looked to the distractor. There were some effects in that study that suggested the older age children (18, 24 months) also were less distractible during “comprehensible” movies than during “incomprehensible” computer-generated patterns. Alternatively, 6 and 12 month old infants were equally attentive to movie and computer-generated patterns.
Currently, the effect of TV program comprehensibility on distractibility is being examined with two kinds of stimuli. First, normal movie-like presentations (e.g., “Follow that Bird”) are presented or movies with scrambled sequences are shown. It is hypothesized that infants from 6 to 24 months will not distinguish these sequences because of an inability to follow the thematic elements of the movie. Alternatively, normal movies with backward speech, foreign language, scrambled speech, or scrambled intrascene sequences should be less comprehensible than either normal sequenced or scrambled sequence movies for older infants for whom language comprehension is advanced enough to appreciate the language elements of the presentation. The level of attention to the movie is examined by recording heart rate changes and determining if infants and young preschoolers are distracted by stimuli presented on peripheral TV monitors.
Three general conclusions come from these studies. First, the basic patterns of distraction from the “main task” are established early in life, as early as 6 months of age. This is shown by the regular relation between visual attention engagement and distraction, and patterns of heart rate change and distraction. Second, the underlying distraction processes are modified by elements external to distractibility. These two studies show that the comprehensibility of the stimuli affects distraction parameters. Finally, these studies show the applicability of the distraction procedure and recording of heart rate changes in the study of attention in the early preschool period.