Managing Attention

This research on Western, Eastern, and Indigenous children and caregivers highlights some of the mechanisms of the development of attention and why it would differ in important ways. Such differences are also seen in how attention is managed when so many things compete for it!

Consider how a busy family has many people engaged in different activities and how the sights and sounds surround an infant. Which of these should the infant look at, listen to or react to? What happens when there is a “competition” for our attention?

The management of attention is another interesting aspect of how we all must use our ability to focus on what is going on in the environment. This idea builds on the previous notion of selecting what to attend to and managing how that attention works when other competing stimuli exist in the environment.

Chavajay and Rogoff (1999) looked at how parents and toddlers shared their attention to competing stimuli in two cultures: Middle-class American and Guatemalan Mayan. The methodology was the same across households, providing a degree of “control” across contexts that the Western laboratory approach favours, but in using materials and interactions that have features of familiarity within participants’ homes.

Chavajay and Rogoff balance such control with authentic interactions in two different cultural contexts. Mothers were interviewed by the researcher in their homes, with their toddlers (aged 14-20 months), one older sibling (three to five years old), a camera operator, and whoever else happened to be in the home, such as other family members. The interview was paused at one point, and the researcher provided novel objects for the mother to show her toddler.

What is really important about these objects is that, indeed, they are novel (recall what was discussed above regarding how novel stimuli tend to draw children’s attention). They are also manipulable and of interest to children (including play dough, a nesting doll and a puppet).

Because there was minimally one sibling present and a whole natural context within a home, the toddlers’ attention was often drawn away from these objects towards other objects, people, and events. The tremendous strength of the researchers’ method was that it created a naturalistic-like setting in which a more controlled observation was carried out.

So, what did the researchers find when they observed the toddlers with novel objects in a setting with competing stimuli? How did the mothers and children attend to such stimuli in American homes compared to Mayan homes?

The authors found that there were two different cultural patterns:

1. American parents and toddlers were more likely to pay attention to one thing at a time, so if two things were happening in the home at the same time, they would go back and forth between them
2. Mayan mothers and toddlers were more likely to pay attention to the two events simultaneously (Chavajay and Rogoff, 1999).

Imagine what this might mean in an early learning environment. If you have children in a room who do not show attentiveness in the same way, should you try to manage their attention in the same way?