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Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults

To adapt to their more varied and unpredictable (language) environments, infants from bilingual homes may gather more information (sample more of their environment) by shifting their visual attention more frequently. However, it is not known whether this early adaptation is age-specific or lasts int...

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Autores principales: D’Souza, Dean, Brady, Daniel, Haensel, Jennifer X., D’Souza, Hana
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7822897/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33483591
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81545-5
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author D’Souza, Dean
Brady, Daniel
Haensel, Jennifer X.
D’Souza, Hana
author_facet D’Souza, Dean
Brady, Daniel
Haensel, Jennifer X.
D’Souza, Hana
author_sort D’Souza, Dean
collection PubMed
description To adapt to their more varied and unpredictable (language) environments, infants from bilingual homes may gather more information (sample more of their environment) by shifting their visual attention more frequently. However, it is not known whether this early adaptation is age-specific or lasts into adulthood. If the latter, we would expect to observe it in adults who acquired their second language early, not late, in life. Here we show that early bilingual adults are faster at disengaging attention to shift attention, and at noticing changes between visual stimuli, than late bilingual adults. In one experiment, participants were presented with the same two visual stimuli; one changed (almost imperceptibly), the other remained the same. Initially, participants looked at both stimuli equally; eventually, they fixated more on the changing stimulus. This shift in looking occurred in the early but not late bilinguals. It suggests that cognitive processes adapt to early bilingual experiences.
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spelling pubmed-78228972021-01-26 Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults D’Souza, Dean Brady, Daniel Haensel, Jennifer X. D’Souza, Hana Sci Rep Article To adapt to their more varied and unpredictable (language) environments, infants from bilingual homes may gather more information (sample more of their environment) by shifting their visual attention more frequently. However, it is not known whether this early adaptation is age-specific or lasts into adulthood. If the latter, we would expect to observe it in adults who acquired their second language early, not late, in life. Here we show that early bilingual adults are faster at disengaging attention to shift attention, and at noticing changes between visual stimuli, than late bilingual adults. In one experiment, participants were presented with the same two visual stimuli; one changed (almost imperceptibly), the other remained the same. Initially, participants looked at both stimuli equally; eventually, they fixated more on the changing stimulus. This shift in looking occurred in the early but not late bilinguals. It suggests that cognitive processes adapt to early bilingual experiences. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-01-22 /pmc/articles/PMC7822897/ /pubmed/33483591 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81545-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
D’Souza, Dean
Brady, Daniel
Haensel, Jennifer X.
D’Souza, Hana
Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults
title Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults
title_full Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults
title_fullStr Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults
title_full_unstemmed Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults
title_short Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults
title_sort early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7822897/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33483591
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81545-5
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