Peer-reviewed article
When stimulus variability accelerates the learning of task knowledge in adults and school-aged children
Kaichi Yanaoka, Félice van’t Wout, Satoru Saito, Christopher Jarrold ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This peer-reviewed study examines how stimulus variability affects learning in adults and school-aged children using a task-switching experiment. Researchers conducted four online experiments comparing how adults and 9-to-10-year-olds learn cognitive control when exposed to varied versus fixed stimuli. The study found that varying uninformative stimuli reduced learning efficiency in children but showed mixed effects in adults. The research contributes to understanding how cognitive development and learning are shaped by variability in learning experiences.
Key points
- Prior experience with reactive control led both adults and children to respond more slowly in subsequent proactive control tasks
- Children (9-10 years) showed more negative transfer when uninformative cues and pre-target stimuli were varied across blocks
- Adults demonstrated evidence of the variability effect when both task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli were varied
- Stimulus variability effects differed between age groups in cognitive control engagement
Limitations
This study focuses on cognitive learning processes in controlled laboratory settings and does not address broader child well-being outcomes, health, protection, or participation. The findings relate to experimental cognitive psychology rather than applied child development or welfare interventions.
Abstract
Experience with instances that vary in their surface features helps individuals to form abstract task knowledge, leading to transfer of that knowledge to novel contexts. The current study sought to examine the role of this variability effect in how adults and school-aged children learn to engage cognitive control. We focused on the engagement of cognitive control in advance (proactive control) and in response to conflicts (reactive control) in a cued task-switching paradigm, and conducted four preregistered online experiments with adults (Experiment 1A: N = 100, Experiment 1B: N = 105) and 9- to 10-year-olds (Experiment 2A: N = 98, Experiment 2B: N = 97). It was shown that prior task experience of engaging reactive control makes both adults and 9- to 10-year-olds respond more slowly in a subsequent similar-structured condition with different stimuli in which proactive control could have been engaged. 9- to 10-year-olds (Experiment 2B) exhibited more negative transfer of a reactive control mode when uninformative cue and pre-target stimuli, which do not convey task-relevant information, were changed in each block, compared with when they were fixed. Furthermore, adults showed suggestive evidence of the variability effect both when cue and target stimuli were varied (Experiment 1A) and when uninformative cue and pre-target stimuli were varied (Experiment 1B). The collective findings of these experiments provide important insights into the contribution of stimulus variability to the engagement of cognitive control.