Why do children's memories often differ from adults' after the same experience? Whereas prior work has focused on children's immature memory mechanisms to answer this question, here we focus on the costs of attentional lapses for learning. We track sustained attention and memory formation across time in 7- to 10-year-old children and adults (n = 120) to show that sustained attention causally shapes the fate of children's individual memories. Moreover, children's attention lapsed twice as frequently as adults', and attention fluctuated with memory formation more closely in children than adults. In addition, although attentional lapses impaired memory for expected events in both children and adults, they impaired memory for unexpected events in children only. Our work reveals that sustained attention is an important cognitive factor that controls access to children's long-term memory stores. Our work also raises the possibility that developmental differences in cognitive performance stem from developmental shifts in the ability to sustain attention.

中文翻译：

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持续注意力的波动解释了儿童记忆形成的每时每刻的变化。

为什么同样的经历后，孩子的记忆往往与成人不同？之前的工作主要集中在儿童不成熟的记忆机制上来回答这个问题，而在这里我们关注的是注意力不集中对学习的成本。我们追踪了 7 至 10 岁儿童和成人 (n = 120) 随时间推移的持续注意力和记忆形成情况，结果表明持续注意力会影响儿童个人记忆的命运。此外，儿童注意力缺失的频率是成人的两倍，而且儿童的注意力波动与记忆形成的关系比成人更密切。此外，尽管注意力缺失会损害儿童和成人对预期事件的记忆，但仅会损害儿童对意外事件的记忆。我们的工作表明，持续注意力是控制儿童长期记忆存储的重要认知因素。我们的工作还提出了一种可能性，即认知表现的发展差异源于维持注意力能力的发展变化。