Alexandra Decker

Why do children remember distracting details better than adults? This could be a silver lining—a benefit—of children's immature attention. The present work establishes this link between immature selective attention and children's broader learning. Furthermore, it adjudicates between two ways that immature attention could drive children's broad learning. One possibility is that children have a “diffuse” attentional spotlight, meaning irrelevant information “leaks” into long‐term memory as children learn about relevant information. Alternatively, children's attention might dart between relevant and irrelevant information across time. While both mechanisms would broaden learning, only diffuse attention would facilitate memories for relevant and irrelevant information from the same event and associations between them. In a sample of children and adults ( n = 130), we find clear evidence that immature attention underlies children's reduced memory selectivity for relevant content. Furthermore, relevant and irrelevant information from the same event were associated in adults' memory but not children's. We also observed that children learned about targets and distractors from different events, a pattern consistent with the idea that children's attention is more likely to dart than diffuse across items. Children's immature and darting attention may, therefore, explain why they remember “distracting” information better than adults.

Why do some experiences endure in memory better than others? Here, we explore the possibility that learning fluctuates rhythmically several times per second, with fortuitously timed experiences being more memorable. Although such fleeting opportunities for encoding would evade our awareness, they are predicted by a prominent model describing how theta rhythms in the brain coordinate memory – the Separate Phases for Encoding and Retrieval (SPEAR) model. Here, in a pre-registered study, we adapted a dense sampling approach to reconstruct the millisecond time-course of memory encoding in n=125 participants. We found that memory encoding fluctuated at a theta rhythm (3-10 Hz), that these rhythms were not a byproduct of rhythmic attention, and that—like theta rhythms in the brain—memory rhythms were modulated by putative markers of acetylcholine. Our findings provide behavioral evidence consistent with the SPEAR model of episodic memory.

Adolescents from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds often underperform on tests of learning and academic achievement. Existing theories propose that these disparities reflect not only external constraints, like limited resources, but also internal decision strategies that adapt to the early environment and influence learning. These theories predict that adolescents from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds explore less and exploit more, which, in turn, reduces learning and academic achievement. Here, we test this possibility and show that lower socioeconomic status in adolescence is associated with less exploration on a reward learning task (n = 124, 12–14-year-olds from the United States). Computational modeling revealed that reduced exploration was related to higher loss aversion. Reduced exploration also mediated socioeconomic differences in task performance, school grades, and, in a lower-socioeconomic status subsample, academic skills. These findings raise the possibility that learning disparities across socioeconomic status relate not only to external constraints but also to internal decision strategies and provide some mechanistic insight into the academic achievement gap.

Why do children remember distracting details better than adults? This could be a silver lining—a benefit—of children's immature attention. The present work establishes this link between immature selective attention and children’s broader learning and adjudicates between two ways that attention could drive developmental differences in memory. One possibility is that children have a more 'diffuse' attentional spotlight, meaning irrelevant information ‘leaks’ into long term memory as children learn about relevant information. Alternatively, children's attention might dart between relevant and irrelevant information across time. While both mechanisms would enhance 'distractor' memories, only diffuse attention would facilitate memories for relevant and irrelevant information from the same event and associations between them. In a sample of children and adults (n=130), we find clear evidence that immature attention underlies children's tendency to prioritize distractors in memory more than adults. Furthermore, relevant and irrelevant information from the same event were associated in adults' memory but not children’s memory. Moreover, unlike adults, children learned about targets and distractors from different events, suggesting their attention is more likely to dart across items. Children’s darting attention may therefore explain why children remember “distracting” information better than adults.

Why do adolescents from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds often underperform on tests of learning and academic achievement? Existing theories propose that these disparities reflect not only external constraints, like limited resources, but also internal decision strategies that adapt to the early environment and influence learning. These theories predict that poorer adolescents explore less and exploit more, which, in turn, reduces learning and academic achievement. However, evidence for this possibility is lacking. Here, we show that lower socioeconomic status is associated with less exploration on a reward learning task (n=124, 12-14-year-olds from the United States). Reduced exploration mediated socioeconomic differences in task performance, school grades, and, in a lower-socioeconomic status subsample, academic skills. Computational modeling revealed that reduced exploration was related to higher loss aversion. Altogether, these findings highlight the importance of considering how socioeconomic status shapes not only the content of learning, but also the learning process itself, and offer a mechanistic explanation for the academic achievement gap.

Disparities in socioeconomic status (SES) lead to unequal access to financial and social support. These disparities are believed to influence reward sensitivity, which in turn are hypothesized to shape how individuals respond to and pursue rewarding experiences. However, surprisingly little is known about how SES shapes reward sensitivity in adolescence. Here, we investigated how SES influenced adolescent responses to reward, both in behavior and the striatum—a brain region that is highly sensitive to reward. We examined responses to both immediate reward (tracked by phasic dopamine) and average reward rate fluctuations (tracked by tonic dopamine) as these distinct signals independently shape learning and motivation. Adolescents (n = 114; 12–14 years; 58 female) performed a gambling task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We manipulated trial-by-trial reward and loss outcomes, leading to fluctuations between periods of reward scarcity and abundance. We found that a higher reward rate hastened behavioral responses, and increased guess switching, consistent with the idea that reward abundance increases response vigor and exploration. Moreover, immediate reward reinforced previously rewarding decisions (win–stay, lose–switch) and slowed responses (post reward pausing), particularly when rewards were scarce. Notably, lower-SES adolescents slowed down less after rare rewards than higher-SES adolescents. In the brain, striatal activations covaried with the average reward rate across time and showed greater activations during rewarding blocks. However, these striatal effects were diminished in lower-SES adolescents. These findings show that the striatum tracks reward rate fluctuations, which shape decisions and motivation. Moreover, lower SES appears to attenuate reward-driven behavioral and brain responses.

Why do children’s memories often differ from adults’ after the same experience? Whereas prior work has focused on children’s immature memory mechanisms to answer this question, here we focus on the costs of attentional lapses for learning. We track sustained attention and memory formation across time in 7- to 10-year-old children and adults ( n = 120) to show that sustained attention causally shapes the fate of children’s individual memories. Moreover, children’s attention lapsed twice as frequently as adults’, and attention fluctuated with memory formation more closely in children than adults. In addition, although attentional lapses impaired memory for expected events in both children and adults, they impaired memory for unexpected events in children only. Our work reveals that sustained attention is an important cognitive factor that controls access to children’s long-term memory stores. Our work also raises the possibility that developmental differences in cognitive performance stem from developmental shifts in the ability to sustain attention.

Attentional lapses have been found to impair everything from basic perception to learning and memory. Yet, despite the well-documented costs of lapses on c

Children get a lot of attention for being powerful “learning machines” in the popular press, but the truth is they remember much less than adults. Even still, many of children’s individual memories are rich and complex and similar in quality to adults’, suggesting what improves in development is not just the quality of our memories, but the frequency with which we form them. Here, we ask why children form memories less often than adults; instead of focusing on memory mechanisms, we focus on an entirely separate aspect of cognition: sustained attention. In adults, sustained attention fluctuates to shape memory in each moment, but we know little about how attention fluctuates in childhood to shape memory formation. To address this gap, 7–10-year-old children and adults (n=120) completed a sustained attention task in which they classified trial-unique images as living or nonliving. We then tested memory for each image, and related attentional fluctuations during classification to subsequent memory. We found that attention fluctuated between states more frequently in children than adults, and that across children, attentional lapse rates correlated with lower memory performance. Within participants, attentional fluctuations shaped the fate of individual memories, such that lapses predicted memory failures. While these fluctuations shaped memory for expected events in both children and adults, they only shaped memory for unexpected events in children, highlighting their particularly detrimental and pervasive influence in development. Our findings raise the possibility that broad developmental differences in cognitive performance reflect the ability to sustain attention.

Attentional lapses have been found to impair everything from basic perception to learning and memory. Yet, despite the well documented costs of lapses on cognition, recent work suggests that lapses might unexpectedly confer some benefits. One potential benefit is that lapses broaden our learning to integrate seemingly irrelevant content that could later prove useful–a benefit that prior research focusing only on goal relevant memory would miss. Here, we measure how fluctuations in sustained attention influence the learning of seemingly goal-irrelevant content that competes for attention with target content. Participants completed a correlated flanker task in which they categorized central targets (letters or numbers) while ignoring peripheral flanking symbols that shared hidden probabilistic relationships with the targets. We found that across participants, higher rates of attentional lapses correlated with greater learning of the target-flanker relationships. Moreover, within participants, learning was more evident during attentional lapses. These findings address long-standing theoretical debates and reveal a benefit of attentional lapses: they expand the scope of learning and decisions beyond the strictly relevant.