Question: What's your favourite facts about your work?

Paul Matusz answered on 15 Nov 2018:

Hi Chicken,

Hi Ava,

Lovely question. I work on understanding how what we know about how people pay attention and learn new information in the world differs between traditional research (that typically uses just visual or just auditory etc. objects) and how information is typically presented in the real world – across multiple senses at once (“multisensory information”). One such incomplete idea is that children are “just more distractful adults”. This has been shown many times, but only with visual information. And in the outside world information is typically multisensory. So when I was in Oxford, we studied young and older children and adults on a task where they searched for visual objects (like green circles and red squares), and whenever there was a new search array, there was always a distractor in the periphery – visual, sound and multisensory (visual and sound presented from the same side of space). I think you know where I’m going with this. And indeed, children were more distracted than adults – when we looked at visual distractors. But when we looked at multisensory distractors, actually children were in some cases “protected” from their influence – but adults were distracted! So children are NOT ALWAYS more distracted adults, the story is more complex than this! 🙂

In the same way, in other studies, I have shown that adults pay attention stronger to visual objects that are accompanied by sounds (so again, multisensory), and that remembering objects is easier when they are .. multisensory.

I wrote a short article about how these findings change what we know about how kids pay attention to multisensory information, as well as a blogpost about how this knowledge changes what we know about how people learn – both written in an accessible way – have a look! 🙂

https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00008

Learning occurs in multisensory environments