This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Erica Barris. Got a minute?

Remember your kindergarten classroom? The maps on the wall, the charts of the seasons on bulletin boards, the alphabet over the blackboard.

I know I spent hours staring at the brightly colored decorations and not

maybe you did too,

and it looks like we're not alone.

The more decorations in a classroom,

the more distracted students may be.

So finds a study in the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers observed five-year-olds in highly decorated classrooms and in classrooms that were

relatively bare, and the kids were less able to hold their focus, spent more time off task, and had

smaller learning gains in the busy rooms than in the bare rooms. At that young age

attention regulation skills aren't fully

formed and yet it's at that stage of development that children find themselves

surrounded by decorations irrelevant to what they're learning at any given time.

The researchers are not prescribing a change from busy to bare rooms.

They say there's more research to be done, but this study, along with previous work, suggests that the visual environment can

affect how young children learn their reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Erica Barris.