Development / Aging
dmunger | July 19, 2005We've posted on boundary extension before, here, here, and here, but we've never written about boundary extension and kids. Boundary extension is when we remember more of a picture than was actually shown to us, as if our mind is actively creating a portion of the image we didn't see, beyond its boundaries. A 2002 team led by John Seamon found that people of all ages experience boundary extension.
Some research has found evidence that boundary extension doesn't work for all images. We reported on a study by Andrew Mathews and Bundy Mackintosh suggesting that for emotional, arousing images,…
dmunger | June 30, 2005Most religions, from Anabaptism to Zoroastrianism, feature some version of Christianity's "Golden Rule": Do undo others, as you would have them do unto you. Aside from being a nice concept, how do we benefit from helping others? From an individual perspective, wouldn't we be better off if we just let others help us out, without giving anything in return? A 2003 study by a team led by Stephanie Brown indicates that we wouldn't (Stephanie L. Brown, Randolph M. Nesse, and Amiram D. Vinokur, University of Michigan; and Dylan M. Smith, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, "Providing Social Support may…
dmunger | June 22, 2005Today's research psychologists typically don't think much of Sigmund Freud. His theories, which tended to be based on literary analysis and interviews with his patients rather than controlled experiments, have been largely discredited (though they continue to be influential in the field of—you guessed it—literary analysis). However, he did discover an important phenomenon which continues to be investigated today. Freud noted that adults do not remember childhood events occurring before they were as old as six. This period of childhood amnesia is now generally believed to end at about age…
dmunger | June 20, 2005Every parent wants his or her child to do well in school. They help the kids with their homework, volunteer in the classroom, do everything they can think of to help their children succeed. But what type of elementary school education actually leads to older kids who do better in school? Typically students are tested at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, and if they improve, their educational program is labeled as successful. This type of assessment, though valuable, sheds little light on what happens in the long run.
A team of researchers led by Gian Vittorio Caprara sought…
dmunger | June 7, 2005Learning to walk was a passion for my son Jimmy. He would sweat and struggle with it until finally he had it mastered—and then it was off to the races. My daughter Nora, by contrast, didn't seem to mind not being able to walk. After all, if you didn't walk, then some sweet grown-up would soon show up and carry you wherever you wanted to go. The photo below illustrates another way Nora convinced others to do the walking for her:
Nora apparently was oblivious to the fact that parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles around the world watch infants' progress in walking with anxious…
dmunger | May 10, 2005Yesterday we discussed the difference between children's and adults' beliefs in magic. Today we will continue that discussion, with two more experiments from the same article by Eugene Subbotsky.
Adults generally claim they don't believe in magic, but they seem to have a different set of rules for fictional objects. While they understand that a real rabbit can't change into a bird, they believe a fictional dog-bird might just be able to turn into a cat-fish. Kids, on the other hand, seem to have a consistent set of rules for both real and fictional objects.
In experiment three, Subbotsky…
dmunger | May 9, 2005Babies love to play peek-a-boo. This simple game can entertain them for hours, even if all you do is hide your face behind your hands. Part of the reason is that for babies, it is really something of a surprise that you return. For most of their first year, babies don't understand that objects exist beyond their view--out of sight is indeed out of mind. Sometime during the first year of life, children develop "object permanence"--they learn that objects still exist even when they are out of view.
In the 75 years since the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget first observed this phenomenon,…
dmunger | April 20, 2005There has been a great deal of reporting about the harmful impact of video games, including here at Cognitive Daily. Yet the simple act of playing a video game can require learning a great deal of information. We have discussed studies showing impressive perceptual gains after just a short time playing a game. Children are highly motivated to play video games (in fact, at times, it's difficult to get them to do anything else).
Yet, perhaps because of the perceived negative impact, there has been surprisingly little research on how to use games for teaching. One exception to this was a study…
dmunger | April 2, 2005One of the most difficult things for small children to learn is how to take someone else's perspective. If a typical three year old hides a toy when her brother is out of the room, she believes he will know where it is when he returns. By the time they are five, most children will not make this error, and understand that other people have a different perspective on the world than they do. Somewhere around the age of four, children gain the ability to understand that others may believe something to be different from the way they see it themselves. I found an old picture of my kids (who are now…
dmunger | March 31, 2005Early childhood education can often seem like one of the most over-researched fields imaginable. So many parents are so concerned with the fate of their progeny, that it's natural for research to focus on more effective ways to teach kids. Yet the process of learning is also so complex that it can be difficult for studies to come up with conclusive results.
University of Chicago researchers Melissa Singer and Susan Goldin-Meadow have done extensive research on the role of gesture in teaching, finding that teachers spontaneously use gestures to teach, and that the use of gestures increases…
dmunger | March 9, 2005Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are lawyers,
Our dads are CEOs.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!
Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein wrote "Officer Krupke" in 1956 as a brilliant satire of contemporary research suggesting that poor kids were more likely to develop psychological problems than middle-class kids. The joke in West Side Story was, the poor kids themselves were the ones singing the song, suggesting that they were aware that the implication that their behavior was somehow society's fault…