Monday, July 16, 2007

I found an interesting article referring to behavior while processing informations.
Below is a fragment of this article:

"Researchers recently discovered that when school children avert their gaze away from a teacher or other person's face, they are much more likely to come up with the correct answer.

Turns out facial expressions can be distracting.

The research was published last week in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

Adults, too

Scientists have known that adults tend to turn their gaze away from a questioner's face when asked a thought-provoking question. While adults practice this look-away about 85 percent of the time, children five years old and younger do it just 40 percent of the time.

To find out how so-called "gaze aversion" impacts concentration, psychologists recruited 20 five-year-old children from a primary school in Stirlingshire. They trained 10 of the students to look away when pondering a question. "We had them look at a blank piece of paper on the floor," said co-author Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon, a psychologist at Stirling University in Scotland. The other 10 students received no training. Then, the scientists asked each child a series of math and verbal questions, ranging from easy to moderate level.

They found that the students instructed to look away answered 72 percent of the questions accurately, while the untrained group succeeded in answering only 55 percent correctly.

"The difference between groups was especially evident on the difficult questions where the [averted gaze] group got on average 60.9 percent correct while the [untrained] kids got only 36.7 percent," Doherty-Sneddon said."


Full version is to be found here.