Dr. Erickson's main line of research has focused on infants and young children’s speech segmentation and word learning, both in optimal and non-optimal (e.g., noisy) environments, and how language learning and comprehension may relate to general cognitive abilities (e.g., attention skills). She also completed doctoral work at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign studying how children’s understanding of language about groups (e.g., “boys are good at math”) might play a role in stereotyping and the achievement gap. Dr. Erickson holds a B.S. in Psychology and B.A. in Germanic Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. After completing her bachelor degrees, she spent a year as a post-baccalaureate research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health at the National Institutes of Health, where her research explored learning and memory in mouse models of schizophrenia.

The views expressed in this post do not represent the views of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Foundation or the United States Government.

This is the second in a series of three guest posts by Dr. Lucy Erickson. Her first post was on background noise and classroom design. These posts all focus on a different type of noise and distraction, and their effects on learning.

Have you ever found yourself avoiding a task that demanded a lot of concentration by tidying up your workspace? You may have just been procrastinating starting something unpleasant, but you also may have been onto something. It may be that clutter in your workspace was actually taking up mental energy that you needed to devote to the task at hand, and that removing visual clutter freed up mental resources and improved your concentration. In my last post, I talked about the negative effects that background noise can have on children, particularly in the context of the learning environment. In this post, I am going to talk about how visual “noise”, or clutter and other visual distractions in the environment, can also detract from children’s learning and performance.