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Why do children take in new information in different ways?
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
Some children easily perceive new information, while others have a hard time. Some children are interested in the learning process, while others are averse to it. Why does this happen?
It is generally accepted that young children learn new things by using the process of elimination and associating new concepts with unfamiliar things. Therefore, to stimulate a child to learn, it is necessary to simultaneously provide him with both familiar and unfamiliar information - known terms will help the child to learn what he does not yet know. But experts from the University of Wisconsin in Madison do not quite agree with this: sometimes familiar concepts only interfere with the memorization of new ones.
The following experiment was conducted: children aged 3 to 4 were shown a pair of illustrations. One of them showed an image of something familiar (for example, a dog or a chair), and the next one showed a completely unfamiliar object. The children were asked to point to the unfamiliar image – like “show me Pythagoras” (where Pythagoras is a fictitious name implying an unfamiliar thing for the child). In addition, the scientists used a special device that controlled the direction of the child’s gaze.
By definition, when looking away from a familiar picture, the baby should look at an unfamiliar one – especially after an unfamiliar word was spoken. But such a reaction was not observed in all cases. It turned out that many familiar pictures were of particular interest to the child, so no attention was paid to the new image at all.
In the second version of the study, children were asked to look at a pair of familiar and unfamiliar objects, and, by analogy, an unfamiliar word followed. It's funny, but in this case, too, everything depended on interest: if the unfamiliar object was not interesting to the child, then practically no attention was paid to it. But the familiar thing was much more interesting in a number of cases.
It should be noted that the goal of the experts was not to prove why a child is interested in one object or another, while another object is of no interest at all. The scientists tried to determine the differences in interest - so they observed the direction of the child's gaze. Children do not hide their interests and will not look at something without true motivation. Therefore, if they are not interested in an object, they most likely will not even remember its name.
Perhaps such results will seem unexpected to many: after all, it is believed that children always gravitate towards something new and unknown. However, here it is necessary to set priorities: new is not always something that can be interesting. Therefore, when trying to teach a child something new, you need to try to interest him in advance.
A detailed report on the research is presented in the publication Child Development - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.13053