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Incidental learning in a multisensory environment across childhood

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Developmental Science

Published online on

Abstract

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty‐one children aged between 6 and 10 years participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT). Participants were asked to respond to the presence of a target stimulus whilst ignoring distractors. Correct target selection resulted in the movement of the target exemplar to either the upper left or right screen quadrant, according to category membership. Category membership was defined either by visual‐only, auditory‐only or multisensory information. As early as 6 years of age, children demonstrated greater performance on the incidental categorization task following exposure to multisensory audiovisual cues compared to unisensory information. These findings provide important insight into the use of multisensory information in learning, and particularly on incidental category learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development will be discussed. The contents of this page will be used as part of the graphical abstract of html only. It will not be published as part of main. The role of unisensory and multisensory cues in incidental category learning was examined in 6‐ to 10‐year‐olds. A reliable facilitatory effect of multisensory stimuli was found from 6 years of age, but undergoes protracted development across the primary school years.