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Why Toddlers Don't Do What They're Told

2009-03-25 14:52:20

LiveScience.com livescience Staff

livescience.com Tue Mar 24, 10:45 pm ET

Are you listening to me? Didn't I just tell you to get your coat? Helloooo!

It's cold out there...

So goes many a conversation between parent and toddler. It seems everything you

tell them either falls on deaf ears or goes in one ear and out the other. But

that's not how it works.

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study

finds.

"I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings," said

psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on

how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things

adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they

are doing something completely different."

Munakata and colleagues used a computer game and a setup that measures the

diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine the mental effort of the child to

study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds.

The game involved teaching children simple rules about two cartoon characters -

Blue from Blue's Clues and SpongeBob SquarePants - and their preferences for

different objects. The children were told that Blue likes watermelon, so they

were to press the happy face on the computer screen only when they saw Blue

followed by a watermelon. When SpongeBob appeared, they were to press the sad

face on the screen.

"The older kids found this sequence easy, because they can anticipate the

answer before the object appears," said doctoral student Christopher Chatham,

who participated in the study. "But preschoolers fail to anticipate in this

way. Instead, they slow down and exert mental effort after being presented with

the watermelon, as if they're thinking back to the character they had seen only

after the fact."

The pupil measurements showed that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor

live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it.

"For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go

get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside," Chatham

explained. "You might expect the child to plan for the future, think 'OK it's

cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.' But what we suggest is that this

isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover

that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and

then they go get it."

The findings are detailed this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy

of Sciences.

Munakata figures the results might help with real situations.

"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to

prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata

said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this

reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in

their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to

face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your

coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that

you can get your coat from your bedroom."