baby

Caregivers who allow their attention to wander from a young child during playtime may diminish their children’s attention span long-term, according to a new study by psychologists at Indiana University.

The study published in the journal Current Biology is the first to establish a link between how long a caregiver looks at an object and how long an infant’s attention remains focused on the same object.

“The ability of children to sustain attention is known as a strong indicator for later success in areas such as language acquisition, problem-solving and other key cognitive development milestones,” said Chen Yu, lead author of the study. “Caregivers who appear distracted or whose eyes wander a lot while their children play appear to negatively impact infants’ burgeoning attention spans during a key stage of development.”

Caregivers and children were fitted with head-mounted cameras that provided researchers with a first-person point of view of the sessions and allowed for relatively normal play between caregiver and child. 

The caregivers fell into one of three groups and experienced varying degrees of success in holding their children’s attention. Those in the first group were more rushed and attempted to guide their children’s interest towards certain toys. In these situations, the children were generally unfocused. 

The caregivers most successful at sustaining their children’s attention were those who let their child guide the direction of play. Their caregivers gave them undivided attention. When the children expressed interest in a certain toy, they encouraged that interest by naming the object and encouraging the child to play with it.

“The responsive parents were sensitive to their children’s interests and then supported their attention,” Yu said. “We found they didn’t even really need to try to redirect where the children were looking.”

The difference in attention between the two was only a matter of seconds, but those seconds over numerous play sessions over a period of months or years can have a significant cumulative effect. In cases where infants and caregivers paid attention to the same object for more than three and a half seconds, the infant’s attention lingered 2.3 seconds longer on average on the same object even after the caregiver’s gaze turned away. This extra time works out to nearly four times longer compared to infants whose caregivers’ attention strayed relatively quickly.

The shortest attention spans were observed in the third type of caregiver, those who did not engage much with their children during the play session. 

“When you’ve got someone who isn’t responsive to a child’s behavior,” Yu commented, “it could be a real red flag for future problems.”