[Source: Medical News Today/Journal of Current Biology]

Photo Credit: Lawren Lu
Although parents may have a hard time believing it, even infants can be trained to improve their concentration skills. What’s more, training babies in this way leads to improvements on other, unrelated tasks.
The findings reported online on September 1 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, are in contrast to reports in adults showing that training at one task generally doesn’t translate into improved performance on other, substantially different tasks. They also may have important implications for improving success in school, particularly for those children at risk of poor outcomes, the researchers say.
“Research suggests that differences in attentional control abilities emerge early in development and that children with better attentional control subsequently learn better in academic settings,” said Sam Wass of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London. “The connection is an intuitively obvious one: the better a child is at concentrating on one object, such as a book, and ignoring distractions, for instance people moving around a room, the better that child is going to learn. We show that attentional control abilities can be trained at a much earlier age than had previously been thought possible.”
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