The cognitive psychologist linking sensory perception and children’s learning
Nora Turoman is investigating how distractions impact children’s working memory
Nora Turoman is a cognitive psychology researcher at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Nora studies how different types of distraction affect children’s learning. She is investigating whether and how children differ from adults with respect to how easily distracted they are. Annie Brookman-Byrne talks with Nora about how her own sensory experiences fuelled her interest in perception, and what she’s learnt from unexpected findings.
Annie Brookman-Byrne: How did you become interested in sensory perception?
Nora Turoman: I worked as a research assistant on a fascinating study of the links between sound perception and language, which found that people can accurately guess which of two totally unfamiliar letter symbols represents the sound “ee” and which is “oo”, based solely on how they look. This suggests that across geographical space and historical time, humans agree on the way that basic linguistic information is represented across the senses.
“Across geographical space and historical time, humans agree on the way that basic linguistic information is represented across the senses.”
These findings sparked memories from my childhood, when I experienced bouts of sensory sensitivities and synaesthesia – the blending of sensations that are usually separate – and discovered that I had a talent for learning languages. I became more and more interested in how our perception of the external world shapes our internal cognitive worlds, and how this, in turn, affects our daily lives.
ABB: Your research looks at the impact of distractions on working memory. What is working memory?
NT: Working memory enables us to keep information active in our minds for a brief period so that we can complete an immediate task. It is incredibly important for learning in school. Children use it to keep facts in mind while learning – for example, remembering numbers while solving a math problem. But they also use it to keep instructions from the teacher in mind as they go about following them. Working memory failures can have serious consequences for school learning, as they may cause students to struggle to follow lectures and perform poorly on assignments, perhaps causing them to be mislabelled as lazy, inattentive, or less capable.
ABB: What have you discovered through your research?
NT: I have studied how visual and auditory information in learning environments can interfere with children’s working memory. School classrooms are full of distractions. Highly decorated classroom walls can be visually distracting, traffic outside of the classroom can be an auditory distractor, and a chatty desk-mate or vibrating smartphone on the desk can be a multisensory distractor. Adults find multisensory distractions to be especially hard to ignore. I’ve been looking at the effects of distractions on working memory over the course of development, as less is known about children in this context.
My colleagues and I tested memories of young adults aged 18-35 and children aged 6-11 while they were exposed to distractions. We consistently found that children’s and young adults’ working memories are similarly affected by distractions. And although it would be expected that multisensory (visual and auditory) information would be hard to ignore, such information was not exceptionally distracting for children’s working memory. Rather, any distraction with a visual component was equally distracting, whether or not it was accompanied by an auditory component.
These surprising findings show that children’s working memory – which is fundamental to learning – is more robust to interference than we might think. This should provide comfort to anyone who worries about shrinking attention spans and distractibility among children in the digital age. I hope these findings can help inform teaching practices. For example, when children are studying visual materials, it is important to reduce visual clutter, while other kinds of distraction may be less important.
ABB: Why were you surprised by your findings?
NT: I thought our findings would reflect what has previously been found in attention research: that older children and adults find multisensory information to be more distracting than purely visual or auditory information, while there is no difference between the two for younger children. Instead, multisensory and visual distractions affected children’s working memory equally, no matter their age.
“Multisensory and visual distractions affected children’s working memory equally, no matter their age.”
This work has taught me the value of unexpected results – the data always tell a story and reveal truths that can inform everyday life. As a result, I now formulate my hypotheses mindful of the possibility of unexpected results, knowing that even if the results are surprising, they still have a story to tell that can benefit science and society.
ABB: What are you studying next?
NT: I want to find out how information that needs to be remembered – as opposed to information that is distracting and should be ignored – is handled in working memory. Does it make a difference whether the information is visual, auditory, or both? I have a set of promising results from research with adults showing that information presented in both auditory and visual form is recalled better. And with a new approach to studying children’s brainwaves to determine what they are retaining in their working memory, we may gain a better understanding of how children’s developing brains treat the information around them as they learn.
Footnotes
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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