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Infants raised in bilingual homes redirect attention faster than infants raised in monolingual homes. How can mere exposure to a bilingual environment affect an infant's cognitive development? The more complex language environment may drive infants to explore (gather more information from) their visual environment to facilitate learning., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests No interests are declared., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

To adapt to their more varied and unpredictable (language) environments, infants from bilingual homes may gather more information (sample more of their environment) by shifting their visual attention more frequently. However, it is not known whether this early adaptation is age-specific or lasts into adulthood. If the latter, we would expect to observe it in adults who acquired their second language early, not late, in life. Here we show that early bilingual adults are faster at disengaging attention to shift attention, and at noticing changes between visual stimuli, than late bilingual adults. In one experiment, participants were presented with the same two visual stimuli; one changed (almost imperceptibly), the other remained the same. Initially, participants looked at both stimuli equally; eventually, they fixated more on the changing stimulus. This shift in looking occurred in the early but not late bilinguals. It suggests that cognitive processes adapt to early bilingual experiences.