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How Do Kids and Grown-Ups Get Distracted in Everyday Situations?

- Nora Turoman, Rebecca Merkley, Gaia Scerif, and Pawel J. Matusz

Imagine that you are 7 years old and need to read four sentences from a book to do your homework. The first two sentences are on a page full of text, while the other two sentences appear by themselves on the next page, with no other text around them. Which sentences do you think you would read faster and with less effort? Would your older sister, who is 11, read these sentences faster than you? What about your dad? Now imagine that you are doing your homework in a different situation. First, you are doing your homework on the table where you have other notebooks with words written on them in large print. Would you get distracted looking at the notebooks? Then, your mom puts a children's program on the radio and they are singing the alphabet—you can hear the speakers saying "a," "b," "c," and other letters. Are you more distracted by this than you were by the notebooks? Which sentences are you now reading more slowly—the ones that are alone on the page or the ones surrounded by other text? Do you think your sister or your dad would have problems like you, or maybe more or less?

License information: CC BY 4.0
MPAA: G
Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00008

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