Why can kids seemingly learn so much without even trying? By comparing how children and adults learn in the lab, we discover a reason why this could be. We find that children and adults pay attention to and process information in very different ways. Children pay attention to their environments in a more holistic and open-minded fashion, thus taking in more information from the worlds around them, kind of like a sponge. On the other hand, adults selectively attend to only one source of information and ignore and filter out everything else. While this can be beneficial for the task-at-hand, it does mean adults are processing and learning less from the environment. Together, this suggests that children learn so much because they are processing more information than adults.