Introduction
Childhood learning environments, especially in kindergarten and elementary school, are often rich with colorful educational materials and other visual displays (Fisher et al., 2014). Extensive colorfulness is used in children's play areas not only in books and toys but also in playground facilities, furniture, carpets, and wall decorations (Sebba, 2005). Media based stimulation (such as television and computer screens) are nowadays an integral part of many play areas (Christakis et al., 2012).
The underlying motivation for these colorful and sensory-rich environments is to elicit the positive, and often crucial, developmental effects that have been found to occur when sensory enrichment is provided during early stages of development (Lewis and Maurer, 2009; Sale et al., 2009; Baroncelli et al., 2010; Clemenson et al., 2015). However, there may be a threshold beyond which children's surroundings become excessively stimulating and disrupting (Godwin and Fisher, 2011; Thompson and Raisor, 2013; Choi et al., 2014; Fisher et al., 2014) and instead of serving as a beneficial enriched environment, they can become a “cacophony of imagery” (Tarr, 2004, p. 1) or a distracting “visual bombardment” (Bullard, 2016, p. 110).
In studies on adult populations, several visual elements that are often used to design sensory enriched environments were found to distract attention and impair performance (e.g., Rodrigues and Pandeirada, 2015). For example, colorfulness—one of the easiest ways to create a sensory enriched environment and a major feature of children's surroundings—may at times become excessively stimulating for adults. Specifically, contrast in brightness (e.g., a light blue object adjacent to a dark blue object, but also two adjacent saturated colors such as a saturated yellow object adjacent to a saturated green object) was found to be a very potent distractor to various tasks (Turatto and Galfano, 2000, 2001; Franconeri and Simons, 2003; Lambert et al., 2003; Franconeri et al., 2005; Fuller et al., 2009). Similar, though milder, effects were also demonstrated for contrast in hue (i.e., wave length; Turatto and Galfano, 2001; Lambert et al., 2003; Lu and Zhou, 2005).
It is difficult to generalize these findings in adults to children in a straightforward manner. On the one hand, visual stimulation may serve as beneficial enrichment in children, much more than in adults. On the other hand, children's attentional abilities and executive functions are still developing (Sarid and Breznitz, 1997; Lopez et al., 2005; Gaspelin et al., 2015) suggesting that children's visual environments may not always be advantageous (Choi et al., 2014). Indeed, while reflexive (automatic) attention is observed shortly after birth (Plude et al., 1994), other aspects of attention, such as the ability to suppress irrelevant information and sustain attention, have a rather long course of development (e.g., Ruff and Capozzoli, 2003; Rueda et al., 2004; Kannass and Colombo, 2007; Bartgis et al., 2008; Fisher et al., 2013; Gaspelin et al., 2015). It was found that toddlers are more prone to attention hijacking by distracting stimuli than are older children, and even at the age of 10 years, children are more susceptible to interference than are adults (Goldberg et al., 2001; Durston et al., 2002). Notably, the ability to sustain attention appropriately to objects, events, and tasks is considered important in many kinds of learning and performance (Ruff and Lawson, 1990). Thus, it is essential to gain a deeper understanding of the competitive environmental stimulations that children encounter during their everyday exploration (Kannas et al., 2006).
Despite this growing understanding of children's distractibility, only a few studies have directly investigated the effects of children's visual environments on their performance. The few available studies suggest a potential adverse effect of colorful backgrounds on children's performance. Ksantini-Hovev and Sebba (2005) showed a negative influence of a colorful desktop background on 8-year-olds' performance in regular school tasks. Eight-year-old children completed sets of equivalent tests in their regular school class, in two different environmental conditions: Desktops were either covered with a white or with a colorful board. In all tests, it took the children less time to complete the assignments on the white background. Moreover, in tests that required written answers (as opposed to multiple choice or math), achievements were significantly higher with the white background. Godwin and Fisher (2011) tested younger children, about 5 years of age, while manipulating the distal visual environment of a laboratory, modifying it to look like a classroom. In the decorated-classroom condition, the walls were decorated with science posters, maps and the children's art work. In the sparse-classroom condition, all materials irrelevant to ongoing instruction were removed. Lessons consisted of a short read-aloud, during which illustrations in a book were shown to the children. Then, the children were given a pencil and paper visual task pertaining to the completed lesson. They found that children spent more time off-task in the decorated-classroom condition. A follow-up study that used a similar design (Fisher et al., 2014) extended these results and demonstrated an adverse effect of the surroundings' colorfulness on children's achievement. Specifically, children achieved lower scores in the decorated-classroom condition compared to the sparse-classroom condition.
Although, still preliminary, these studies suggest that both the distal (e.g., wall decorations) and proximal (e.g., colorfulness of the desktop) colorfulness of children's environments can affect children's performance. While Ksantini-Hovev and Sebba (2005) studied older children and focused on proximal effects, Godwin and Fisher (2011) and Fisher et al. (2014) studied younger children and focused on distal colorfulness. The present research seeks to extend the previous studies to an even younger age group and focus on proximal colorfulness. This type of study conducted with younger children seems especially warranted for the following reasons: (1) Paradoxically, younger children, who are more prone to distraction, are usually surrounded by more colorful and decorated environments (Fisher et al., 2014), manifested in wall decorations, as well as in the colorfulness of furniture, carpets, and surrounding toys. (2) Moreover, in many cases the colorfulness is obtained by using combinations of saturated colors, resulting in sharp contrasts of hue and brightness (Sebba, 2005).
In this pilot study, young preschoolers (aged three to four) engaged in developmentally appropriate structured play on a non-colorful (white) and on a colorful surface, while their behavior was monitored. The colorful surface was characterized by highly saturated colors, creating sharp hue, and brightness contrasts, and served as an operational representation of a child's natural proximal play area (e.g., playing on a colorful carpet). Based on the previous findings with older children, we hypothesized that, relative to a non-colorful play surface, a highly colorful one would interfere with young children's structured play and would induce more behaviors indicating disruption in task execution.
Discussion
The goal of this study was to test the effect of a colorful surface background on preschool children's structured play. Children's environments are often designed to be very colorful (e.g., colored chairs, colored storage boxes, and colorful carpets. See Figure 2 in Supplementary Material for an example). Even in cases where colorfulness is not explicitly intended, the available visual view of a child playing on the floor or sitting by a table can be a cacophony of colors coming from colored toys and objects scattered nearby or the other children wearing colored clothes (see Figure 3 in Supplementary Material for an example). Accordingly, we created a proximal colorful play surface and placed it on the floor and in front of the playing child. The pre-test phase allowed us to test children having the same familiarity level with the games (children played the games after four to six repeats) and to avoid novelty effects (with the experimenter, the games, and the room), and adjust the play level to each child individually.
We hypothesized that relative to a non-colorful play surface, a colorful one would interfere with children's structured play and would induce more behaviors indicating disruption in task execution. Overall, as hypothesized, we observed a greater number of behaviors indicating disruption in task execution when children played on a colorful surface area as opposed to a non-colorful, white one. These disruption processes manifested in children behaviors, such as bringing their heads closer to the working surface, staring away, emitting vocalizations, and statements indicating frustration or feeling of incompetency, dropping, or missing pieces of the game that were in front of them, and making more use of manual, rather than visual search. Our findings are in line with previous findings with older children, indicating distracting effects of excessive proximal colorfulness (Ksantini-Hovev and Sebba, 2005) and distal colorful classroom decorations (Godwin and Fisher, 2011; Fisher et al., 2014) during various tasks.
It is interesting to speculate about the mechanisms underlying the current findings. The behaviors we observed may be due to attentional interference created by the sharp contrasts of hue and brightness at the proximal background. Indeed, previous work in the field of attention research indicates that contrasts of brightness and hue are capable of capturing attention in adults (e.g., Turatto and Galfano, 2000, 2001; Lambert et al., 2003; Fuller et al., 2009). Although, similar studies were not conducted in children, according to empirical studies in developmental psychology the ability to voluntarily control attention and avoid attention hijacking is immature in preschool children (Ruff and Capozzoli, 2003; Kannass and Colombo, 2007; Ristic and Kingstone, 2009). For example, 3- to 4-year-olds showed less abilities to voluntarily control attention than 5-year-olds (Fisher et al., 2013). Therefore, we suggest that the excess hue and brightness contrasts in the background were distracting factors, which required significant attentional resources of the children and competed for resources required for the task at hand.
Given the above post-hoc speculation, it is interesting to note the work of Kannass and Colombo (2007), who studied children of a similar age to the present study's participants, and with similar problem-solving tasks, in three different conditions: no distraction, intermittent (periodic) distraction, or continuous distraction. The distractors were 5-s-long segments of a TV show, which were presented either intermittently or continuously in a language foreign to the subjects. They found that the most significant impairment of attention was in the continuous condition, and suggested that at this age, children cannot tune out the constant competition for attentional focus represented by the continuous distractor, and that continuous distractors might be most disruptive for cognitive function and performance (Kannass and Colombo, 2007). Based on the present findings, we suggest that a constant but excessive colorful background can similarly serve as a continuous visual distractor competing for a child's mental resources. Indeed, some of the behaviors we identified could be interpreted as signs of attentional interference and competition. For example, head approach can be interpreted as an attempt to narrow the breadth of the attentional lens and restrict the visual area to which attentional resources are directed (an ability that is not fully developed at this age, Pasto and Burack, 1997). Eye relaxation, frustration, and dropping a piece can be interpreted as signs of depletions of these attentional resources.
Importantly, our exploratory bottom-up approach, which did not focus solely on attentional processes, enabled us to identify additional putatively disrupting behaviors that could possibly hint to further mental processes affected by excessive colorfulness. Behaviors such as manual search, missing a piece, and head approach may also be interpreted as indications of perceptual interferences. The tasks conducted by the children in our study required perceptual processes such as detection and discrimination of the game parts (puzzle and Lego pieces) from the background. Specifically, placing colorful game parts on a white background required visual detection, whereas in the colorful condition, the same task is required and in addition there is a need for activation of visual discrimination. The failure to discriminate occurs whenever stimuli are similar, and can lead to confusion (Wickens et al., 1997, pp. 102, 107). Background complexity can slow down and even hinder identification of objects (Wolfe et al., 2002). Thus, these additional processes may have contributed to the mental load and depletion created by the colorful background, and in turn, elicited behaviors indicating fatigue (such as eye relaxation, frustration, and dropping a piece).
Another potential explanation to the observed behaviors is that the novelty of the decorations rather than the visual stimulation per se (Imuta and Scarf, 2014) disrupted children's play behavior. Since the same children were alternated between non-colorful and colorful conditions, the transition to the colorful environment may have elicited a novelty effect. Indeed, children are known to respond strongly to novelty. Some of the most established empirical procedures to study cognitive development in children rely on children's preference to attend to novel stimuli (Imuta and Scarf, 2014). Although, in the current study children accommodated to the novel surrounding for at least 2 min before the experiment began, it may still be that some of the behaviors we observed in our study were due, at least in part, to the novelty of the colorful surface. In line with this, we suggest that future studies should assess emotional and arousal levels as an indicator for novelty effects.
The present study cannot differentiate the specific mechanisms by which excessive colorfulness may affect attentional, perceptual or other cognitive processes. However, regardless of the exact mechanisms, we suggest that the excess of hue and brightness contrasts in the colorful background demand significant mental resources (Choi et al., 2014), at the expense of the resources for normative play, leading to tiredness, fatigue, and difficulty in task execution.
Individual differences also warrant further investigation. Our findings that the colorful background induced more putative disruption-indicative behaviors are based on the average group data. However, for a few children, the colorful surface actually induced fewer of these behaviors relative to the non-colorful surface. According to several researchers, there are individual differences in arousal levels and in the way people react to and process sensory information (Dunn, 2001). While for some children the colorfulness of the surrounding may be excessive and disrupting, for others it may provide just the right amount of stimulation to support optimal arousal. Although, on average it seems that highly colorful surfaces interfere with children's play more than non-colorful surfaces, further research into the individual differences observed in this study may lead to insights into designing children's environments in ways that can be helpful for individuals with different types of sensory and arousal profiles.
As mentioned in the previous section, findings regarding disruptive behaviors were obtained for all the games taken together. A closer look revealed that these differences were more pronounced in the puzzle and Lego games, while the difference for the Lotto task did not reach significance. As the Lotto part was always the last game, this finding may stem from an accumulated effect of tiredness and mental depletion. Another explanation is that the white magnetic board underneath the picture cards in the Lotto game (see Figure 3) helped reduce the distracting effects of the colorful background and thus reduced the difference between the two conditions. This suggests that it may be helpful to delimit the working space of children with a color-quiet surrounding to attenuate effects of colorfulness in the periphery of the visual field. Further research is required to assess whether indeed an immediate neutral background can buffer effects of the colorful surroundings.
There are several limitations to our study and conclusions. A major limitation of this pilot study is the small sample size of 15 subjects. This prevented randomization of the order of the games. This sample size also did not allow a thorough analysis of inter-subject differences. Second, although running the experiment in the preschool setting had many advantages, the downside of this approach was the difficulty to control for all variables. For example, there was no control over the colorfulness of the children's clothing and accessories. Thirdly, though one of the coders was naïve as to the purpose of the experiment, the investigator that played with the children and was involved in the development of the coding scheme (K.S.E), was not blind to the hypothesis of the experiment. Fourthly, children were not screened for color blindness. Although we assume that the brightness in contrasts would be visible to colorblind people, and if any, colorblindness in one or more individuals would strengthen our results, we have not directly tested this point. Fifthly, our setup enabled us to study disruption to the structured play but not the direct effects on task performance. Children were not given a time limit nor directed to explicitly announce when they were finished. Future studies should design age-appropriate tasks in which success can be measured more directly. Finally, our study focused on situations in which the play area (as designed intentionally or as perceived from a child's viewpoint) was highly colorful. Importantly, we did not study the effect of colored surfaces composed of single colors. Our results cannot be generalized to play environments that use less variety of colors, or when children engage in structured play with only one color as a background.
In summary, the present findings suggest that excessive colorfulness, which is often used to create enriched environments and is considered developmentally beneficial to children, impacts children's behavior in ways that may be indicative of interference to their engagement in structured play tasks. Based on our results, and based on previous findings in older children (Ksantini-Hovev and Sebba, 2005; Godwin and Fisher, 2011; Fisher et al., 2014), we suggest that caution is warranted when designing colorful children's environments. Further studies should elaborate this investigation, extending it to other sources of stimulation (e.g., noise, light, smell etc.), different play environments, and the potential of moderating effects.