Incidental learning in a multisensory environment across childhood

Abstract

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty-one children aged between 6 and 10 years participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT). Participants were asked to respond to the presence of a target stimulus whilst ignoring distractors. Correct target selection resulted in the movement of the target exemplar to either the upper left or right screen quadrant, according to category membership. Category membership was defined either by visual-only, auditory-only or multisensory information. As early as 6 years of age, children demonstrated greater performance on the incidental categorization task following exposure to multisensory audiovisual cues compared to unisensory information. These findings provide important insight into the use of multisensory information in learning, and particularly on incidental category learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development will be discussed.

Figure 1

Exemplars of target stimuli from visual categories 1 and 2 (A and B, respectively)

Figure 2

MALT presentation order. The final depicted screen would appear following a correct key‐press response to the target stimulus, with dashed arrow indicating direction of movement to correct category habitat

Figure 3

Mean (SE) correct on category identification test in each age group across learning conditions

Figure 4

Relationship between chronological age and number correct on category identification task in each learning condition

Figure 5

Mean (SE) explicit category knowledge score for each age group across learning conditions