Date post: | 12-Apr-2017 |
Category: |
Documents |
Upload: | ashley-jordan |
View: | 79 times |
Download: | 2 times |
Co-‐development of Spatial Skills and Language (Lead Researcher: Hilary Miller)
Many cognitive skills develop together in early childhood, making it difficult to determine whether some skills depend on others. Much of our prior research has focused on children’s spatial skills, which may be supported by learning spatial words. To test how spatial language might relate to children’s spatial skills, we compared 4-‐year-‐olds’ performance across various spatial tasks—imagining how two pieces of a shape form one shape, mentally rotating a picture to find another that matches, or picking which two pictures show the same spatial relations—to their ability to describe verbally where a mouse was in a spatial scene. We were particularly interested in what kinds of words kids chose to describe where the mouse was when some of the objects in the scene looked the same—did they use only location words, or did they also use size and color words? In different scenes, color and size words were helpful or not. Our results showed that children’s skills in using language to describe spatial scenes were developing simultaneously with their spatial abilities. We think these results provide evidence that children’s attention to task-‐relevant information supports the development of both spatial language and more general spatial skills. We are currently designing a training study to test whether helping kids learn what to pay attention to will lead to improvements in both spatial skills and language.
What Makes a Camel a Camel? When Children Learn General Versus Specific Features (Lead Researcher: Clint Jensen)
Children learn many different concepts during early childhood, some of which are general (like “animal”) and some of which are specific (like “camel”). Some of these concepts have uniquely identifying characteristics, like the hump on a camel. Research on aging and dementia shows that adults lose specific information from concepts before general information—they may forget that a camel should have a hump, but they will remember that it should have four legs. We are currently studying whether children learn first the concepts that are lost later in aging, that is, do they learn general features first? If so, this may explain why those features persist longer in aging. We have tested this by showing children pairs of animals with or without
characteristic features of certain concepts, like a camel with a hump versus a camel without a hump, and as a comparison, a donkey with a flat back versus a donkey with a hump. We asked children to choose which animal was real and which was ‘silly’, and then we compared whether their choices were more accurate for general or specific features. Our results showed that 3-‐year-‐olds make the same kinds of errors as the elderly, that is, they recalled the general information better than the specific information; by 5 years old, however, children recall all information equally well. These results can help us understand how features are learned over time, and may provide insights into re-‐teaching information that was lost to those with memory impairments.
Hello and Thank You from the Social Kids and SPACE Labs!
Dear Parents, Friends, and Teachers,
We’ve been busy since our last newsletter! Thank you for all of your help and support! Without families and schools like yours, we would not be able to conduct our research. This newsletter summarizes findings from studies we conducted over the past year and previews some ideas for future research in our labs. If you have any questions as you read, please feel free to contact us for more information!
Best wishes, Kristin Shutts, Director of the Social Kids Lab & Assistant Professor of Psychology Vanessa Simmering, Director of the SPACE Lab & Assistant Professor of Psychology
Congratulations to our lab members on their accomplishments!
Karissa Propson and Talia Stoehr were accepted to the social work graduate program at UW-‐Madison. Rachel King was awarded an Undergraduate Travel Award to attend the SRCD Biennial Meeting in Spring 2015. Ashley Jordan (Social Kids Lab Manager from 2013-‐2015) was accepted to the psychology PhD program at Yale University. Maggie Underwood was accepted to the school psychology program at Michigan State University. Mitch Markman was accepted to the school psychology program at UW-‐Madison. Leah Schaumberg was accepted to the clinical mental health program at Marquette University. Emily Cierzan was accepted to the mental health counseling program at the University of Cincinnati.
A look at SPACE Lab studies…
Children’s Social Inferences in the Food Domain (Lead Researcher: Ashley Jordan)
Young children face the enormous task of learning about people and their social relationships – for example, they must discern whether two people are friends, family members, or strangers. In one line of work in the lab, we are studying whether children might use other people’s food preferences and behaviors to infer the nature of their relationships.
In our first study, 3-‐ to 6-‐year-‐old children watched animated characters interact with foods. The characters either agreed or disagreed on three different things: (1) what their favorite food was, (2) what their least favorite food was, or (3) exactly how they ate their food. After learning this information about a pair of characters, we asked children to use a four-‐point scale to indicate how socially close the two people were. The endpoints on the scale were “strangers” and “best friends”. We found that children rated people who liked or disliked the same food as being closer to one another than people who disagreed about their likes and dislikes. Further, we found that children rated others as being closer when they performed the same motion with a food prior to eating it. We are extending this line of work on relationship closeness by
asking children to indicate what type of relationship the characters have. For example, we are now asking if the characters are strangers, schoolmates, friends, or siblings. We are also testing whether children give the same responses when the characters talk about or interact with artifacts rather than foods. We hope this research will shed light both on how young children learn about social relationships, as well as how young children come to think about food and culture.
Interventions to Address Social Biases (Lead Researcher: Maggie Renno)
Numerous studies in our lab indicate that children use information about social categories – for example, other people’s gender and race – to guide their friendship preferences. In two current lines of research, we are investigating whether it is possible to change children’s preferences for, and behaviors toward, others who appear to be different from them. In one line of research, we tested whether receiving help from racial outgroup members in the context of a computer game would change children’s racial attitudes. Our findings indicate that receiving help from racial outgroup members does improve children’s attitudes toward those helpful individuals, as well as new individuals that share the racial category membership of those helpers. In a second line of research, we were interested in understanding ways to reduce gender-‐based social exclusion in young children. Numerous studies (including ones in our lab) have shown that young children tend to include children who match their own gender in play activities, and tend to exclude children who do not. In our intervention study, we asked participants to reflect on the emotional consequences of social exclusion by rating the feelings of children whom they had excluded from an activity. The experience of reflecting on others’ emotions prompted participants to be more inclusive of children who did not match their own gender in future activities. These studies – as well as others in our lab – help us understand ways to inspire children to be more open to people from different backgrounds!
A look at Social Kids Lab studies…
"Who would you like to bring with you to the zoo?"
“How close do you think they are?”
Infant and Toddler Social Preferences (Lead Researcher: Maggie Renno)
People exhibit a variety of cues to indicate their interest in social interaction and affiliation. Common social engagement signals include looking someone in the eye and showing positive facial expressions. In the present research, we asked whether infants actively select their social partners on the basis of information about gaze (direct vs. averted) and emotional expression (positive vs. neutral). In these studies, infants sat on a parent’s lap in front of two touchscreen computer monitors. After learning how to activate the monitors, infants were given the opportunity to choose between images of two adults. Infants selected the monitor featuring the smiling adult with direct gaze more often than the monitor featuring the adult with neutral expression and averted gaze. In ongoing studies, we are using the same touchscreen method to ask questions about the social preferences of both infants and toddlers. In these studies, we introduce participants to the same touchscreen monitors. However, participants in our new studies choose between a boy and a girl on each trial. While other studies in our lab indicate that preschool-‐age children show same-‐gender preferences, this new study with infants and toddlers will help us to understand the earlier origins and emergence of gender preferences.
Learning from Social Cues in Classroom Settings (Lead Researcher: Libbie Brey)
Schools provide contexts for children to learn about more than just the content of their teachers’ lessons. In particular, when teachers instruct students about topics like math and reading, they also provide students with information about how well children are doing in these subjects. Previous research suggests that children pay close attention to information teachers convey about their own academic abilities. However, less is known about whether children pay attention to information teachers convey about other students’ abilities. One set of ongoing studies in our lab is focused on whether children tune in to adults’ behaviors in order to make inferences about their peers. In our first study, children (4-‐8 years of age) watched videos in which a teacher interacted with two students who both behaved identically. In some videos, the teacher provided direct feedback (e.g., “You tried hard and did a good job” or “You need to try harder because you did not do well”), and in others she demonstrated different body language to the two students while they read from a book (e.g., smiling at one student and looking at the other student with a neutral face). After each video, children indicated which of the two students they thought was smarter. We found that children as young as 5 years of age indicated that they thought the student who received direct positive feedback or indirect positive body language was smarter. We are just beginning this line of research and have many future studies planned. We hope that our research will contribute to our understanding of the many ways children learn about other people in their social world.
Power and Body Language (Lead Researcher: Rachel King) Body language reveals a lot about a person, and several prior studies in our lab suggest that children as young as 5 years of age are able to use body language to figure out who holds more power in social interactions. In previous studies, we showed children videos and photos of real people where one person displayed body language cues associated with people who are high in power (for example, shoulders back and direct eye gaze), while another person displayed body language cues associated with people who have less power (for example, shoulders slouched and averted eye gaze). Older children (5 to 6 years of age) were very accurate at guessing who was “in charge” in these videos and photos, but younger children (3-‐ and 4 year-‐olds) had some difficulty. In a follow-‐up study, we investigated whether younger children might be able to use body language to guess who was “in charge” if we helped them focus on the relevant information. To do this, we showed children the same photos from our first study. This time, however, we drew their attention to the relevant pieces of information. For example, in the photo where the people’s shoulder positions were different, children were asked to look specifically at each person’s shoulders, and we highlighted each person’s shoulders with a red circle. When we directed their attention to the relevant body language cues, 4-‐year-‐old children were quite accurate at guessing who was in charge. However, 3-‐year-‐olds still found the task hard. These findings show that children as young as 4 years of age are capable of using subtle body language information to figure out the nature of people’s relationships. However, their use of such information is more robust and spontaneous later in development.
“You tried hard and did a good job!”