As an adult if you were asked to look at a picture with a cat in the foreground and a wide mountain range in the background and remember the mountains later on if you saw them in a subsequent picture that would be no hard task for an adult.
However, in a new study by the Ohio State University when preschool kids were asked to perform the same visual-memory task it was found that they focus so much on the cat they won’t later be able to recognize the mountain range.
These results from the study suggest that young children’s attention is biased toward focusing on objects rather than scenes even when asked to focus on the scene rather than an object.
Researchers found that almost exclusively young children couldn’t ignore objects in photos irrelevant to the tasks they were asked to complete by looking at the photos.
The study was recently printed in the journal called “Child Development.”