Different Attentional and Memory Processes When Learning From a Peer or an Adult in Children

Abstract

Both adult–child and child–child interactions support learning, yet it remains unclear whether children engage distinct cognitive strategies depending on the social context. In this study, 62 children aged 6–12 years, tested in Switzerland, completed a memory task in which novel objects were introduced by either a child or an adult speaker. Eye-tracking was used to measure visual attention during encoding. Across conditions, children attended more to people than to objects, with age predicting increased attention to peer speakers. Crucially, attentional strategies predicted memory performance in context-specific ways: in the peer condition, longer fixation on objects enhanced recall, whereas in the adult condition, attention to the speaker was more beneficial. Despite these patterns, when later asked to choose a favourite real object, children more often selected one that had been introduced by an adult than by a peer. Together, these findings suggest that children flexibly tailor their attentional and mnemonic strategies to the social source of information, underscoring the value of combining peer- and adult-led opportunities in educational practice.