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5th May 2022
12:29am BST
The study, conducted by the School of Psychology at Belfast's Queen's University, involved 97 children ranging in age from six to 11 years old, and what the researchers found, was that not only was daydreaming extremely common among children in this age group, but it also, as it turns out, affects the ability to learn.
The professors involved in carrying out the research said in a statement that said that knowing more about daydreaming in children could help with finding ways to reduce it in school.
"In school, often children can get in trouble for mind wandering, it is sometimes viewed as a sign of disrespect or misbehaviour, if they are not paying attention," Dr Agnieszka Graham, who was involved in the study, said in a statement."However, our research has found that children, like adults, are unable to fully concentrate all the time, it's likely that their minds will wander for a substantial proportion of a typical school day."
She added:
"Our findings indicate that further exploring the causes and consequences of mind wandering in these early years at school could provide a solid foundation for developing interventions to help children detect when their minds strayed from the task at hand and refocus their attention."
In previous studies involving adults, research has found that higher rates of daydreaming "have been implicated in poorer performance on a range of learning activities, including reading," according to the Queens University Belfast paper.
To conduct their research, the Belfast-based researchers had the children listen online to a pre-recorded story about a fictional pharaoh in Ancient Egypt.
Roughly every two minutes, they were asked a question to check if they were paying attention or if their mind had wandered to something else.
In the exercise, the children reported "mind-wandering" around a quarter of the time.
After the story was over, the children were then asked 10 questions to see what they could remember about it, whether they had liked the story and how interested they were in it.
What the researcher found, was that whether the children were interested or not affected how often they daydreamed and those who daydreamed more frequently remembered less about the story.
This suggests, of course, that if children are highly interested in a lesson in school, they will daydream less.
The team said that the results indicated that daydreaming "can be reliably measured in children and is of educational significance".
"Mind wandering is detrimental during educationally significant activities," the paper said.
"In an educational context, if students fail to attend to instruction because of (daydreaming) this may impede their chances of acquiring crucial skills or knowledge. Children's interest in the topic influenced the level of mind wandering, which in turn influenced participants' ability to recall facts from the story."
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