Children's Attention to and Comprehension of Explicit versus Implicit Information on Television

The present study focused primarily on children's processing of two different kinds of information contained in two animations. The two animations were divided into 24 and 10 sections. Each section was classified as an explicit or implicit section concerning the derivation of the answer to the question based on each section. The subjects were 48 kindergartners (aged 4 and 5) who were divided into two groups to view these two animations. The group receiving a distraction stimulus (slides projected on a curtain) was designated as the distractors group while the other with no distractors was designated as the no‐distractors group. The results for children of both age 4 and 5 fell into three categories. (1) Distractive slides significantly reduced children's visual attention to both explicit information and implicit information. There was no significant attention difference between age 4 and 5. (2) Distraction produced little effect on children's comprehension of implicit information while producing a significant reduction in the comprehension of explicit information. (3) Children aged 5 markedly outperformed those aged 4 on the comprehension of implicit information. It was suggested that children processed the implicit information actively whereas they processed the explicit information reactively. Results also proved that preschoolers have the ability to comprehend implied information, and that this ability increases substantially with age.