Researchers from the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck Collge, University of London, tested more than 40 children at 11-months-old for their concentration abilities.
One group of children participated in 77 minutes of computerised concentration training, computer games devised by the researchers that react differently depending on where the infant is looking. Children who took part in this training were rewarded for looking in just one place and resisting the urge to look somewhere else.
Another group of children spent the same amount of time watching age appropriate television programmes.
The findings indicated that the children who took part in the concentration training had an improved ability to sustain their attention compared to the children who watched television.
According to the researchers, previous studies suggest that good concentration abilities are vital for early learning, both during language acquisition and for later learning.
Professor Mark Johnson, head of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck said, ‘Our results indicate that are the very beginning of life, in early infancy, certain cognitive skills may be trainable. If the effects of training prove robust over the longer term, methods such as ours may have be used as interventions aimed at improving key learning skills in babies at risk of poor outcomes.’
The authors claim that further work is required to examine whether larger amounts of concentration training can lead to greater changes in ‘real world’ settings, and whether the impact of training is long lasting.
- The study, Training Attentional Control in Infancy, is published in the September issue of the journal Current Biology.
