Sharing is Caring

Have you ever tried to get a toddler to share? Do you think it’s an impossible mission? Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh showed that it’s actually pretty easy.

Sharing

Sharing behaviour is thought to be a part of “human lore”. Whether it is biologically encoded or just learned from being a part of human society, sharing is a behaviour that has helped the human race thrive.

But when do we begin to share? And what would compel us to share something?

Celia Brownell and her students used sharing tasks to measure toddlers (18- and 24-month-olds, which are pretty little). In these tasks, the experimenter first gave an equal amount of toys to the participating child and another experimenter who was playing the role of “play mate”. The experimenter then took all the toys back and gave all of them to the child. The “play mate” then indicated that she would like the child to share by giving subtle (sighing, looking sad) and not so subtle cues (reaching unsuccessfully for the toys, and eventually asking for some toys). In addition to the sharing tasks, they also tested children’s understanding of ownership (for instance, being able to identify mommy’s shoes and the child’s shoes as such), and got parental reports of the child’s self-understanding (things like using the word “me”) and language (which not enough studies measure!).

What Did They Find?

They found that almost all (96%) 24-month-olds shared at least once during those sharing tasks. In contrast, only 65% of the 18-month-olds shared at least once. So, about a third of the year-and-a-half old kids never shared the toys they were playing with or the snack they were given. The 18-month-olds seem to be either confused about what the “play mate” was doing, or they were just oblivious.

Another neat finding was that understanding ownership was related to sharing behaviour over and above age. So, regardless of age, children who better understood ownership shared more. What’s interesting is that it looks like it has to do with understanding social norms. The thing about ownership (a fascinating topic all by itself) is that there is nothing in the shoes that inherently marks them as belonging to mommy. So, in order to know that these are mommy’s shoes there is at least some kind of learning of links between objects and people. The authors suggest that both of these things, understanding ownership and sharing, may be driven by some kind of understanding of social norms and values, such as understanding that objects have value. However, it seems to me that the driving force might be just paying attention to the world around them and particularly to the people around them.

Can We Help Children Share?

Is there a way to promote sharing behaviour? One of the things about this study that differentiate it from previous studies on the topic is that the “sacrifice” of sharing wasn’t big. These were not toys that the children were particularly attached to, nor were they expected to share all of the toys – just some of them. I think these are interesting points. If the child can have an alternative or doesn’t have to share everything, it might be easier for them. I know for my kids, sharing ice cream is a lot harder than sharing chicken, for instance. And my kids are probably abnormal sharers – they are really good about sharing with each other (see picture above). With other kids, well, that’s a different story.

Were your kids good at sharing when they were two? Do you remember a turning point? Was it better with older/younger siblings? Please share your sharing stories!

 

The Magic Touch

Photo Credit: David Eugene

Here’s a short tidbit gleamed at the conference I attended a few weeks ago (has it been that long? Really?). One of the posters presented at the conference showed evidence that when you touch a child gently on the back while asking her to do something, that child is much more likely to comply with the request.

What the authors did was run a task that is similar to the Marshmallow task in that the child has to wait and refrain from eating a small reward in order to get a big reward later. The study was very well done: children were randomly assign to either touch or no-touch condition; all children completed a cognitive control task before they saw the delay of gratification task (and there were no differences in cognitive control between the groups); and from our conversation with the researcher who presented the poster, it sounds like even in the no-touch condition she was careful to ensure the children were paying attention to her (so it’s not just that the touch increased attention to the researcher’s words, it’s very possibly something about the touch itself).

Because this was a poster, there aren’t enough details to evaluate the methodology in a rigorous way (what I try to do here most of the weeks), but I for one am looking forward for these researchers to publish their findings because I think it’s fascinating. On the practical side, I’m so going to try this with my son next time I want him to do something!

 

Baby Sign Language: What is it good for?

Photo Credit: Athensparents.com

Baby sign language is very popular these days. There are classes and online resources and it’s all based on the premise that signing with your baby introduces a host of benefits from better communication to long-lasting language advantage. A very recent study done by a group of researchers from Hertfordshire University put the premise to the test, and examined the effects of baby sign language on language development.

What they did

The authors recruited forty 8-month-old infants and their mothers, and randomly assigned each mother-infant dyad to one of four groups: a) British Sign Language training (for mothers); b) symbolic gesturing system (gestures adapted from baby-signing courses) training; c) “verbal training” (the mothers got the instructions to use the same words as the mothers in the other two groups, but there was no signing information); and d) no intervention at all. The design is beautiful. The researchers even made sure that the same words were used in all the “treatment” groups, and they assigned the same number of female and male infants (5 and 5) to each group, to control for the known gender effects. I particularly like the fact that they had not one, but two control groups (verbal training and no intervention). They followed up on the kids until the kids were 20 months old, and called the mothers every two weeks to do a phone interview (and probably mostly to remind them to use the signs).

What they found

The authors report that there was no effect at all of the intervention. The authors write: “The overall language development of all infants was similar regardless of the intervention that they experienced.” (pp. 579). Infants in the intervention groups acquired the target words a little earlier than the children in the no-intervention group, but that seems to be the extent of the impact of treatment. The authors conclude that there is no benefit to encouraging baby signing, at least when it comes to language development.

Problems

Here is my problem with this beautifully designed study: they had 40 infants total in their sample. That’s a very small sample size. In general, effects in child development tend to be small – there are a lot of factors in play, and no one thing determines something as complex as a child’s language skills. From a statistics point of view, the smaller the effect, the larger the sample you need to see it in the data. I ran the math, and their chances of detecting a small effect were 12%. In other words, there very well may be a small effect of using sign language with babies, but that in this study the sample was not big enough to detect it. Now, it’s true that this probably means that there is no huge benefit to signing from a language point of view. But the authors make it sound like there is no point at all: in talking about mothers who sign up for baby signing classes and such they say, “the efforts of these mothers may be unnecessary.” (pp. 586).

My two cents

I personally think there is a huge difference for the mother and for the mother-baby communication when using signs. I didn’t use signs with my son until he started daycare. When he started daycare (he was 9 months old and did half-days for a couple of months) he started signing because he learned it from the daycare workers. They taught me some of the signs, and it made the communication so much easier. He could say what he wanted – not everything he wanted, obviously – and I could see it was making him feel “empowered”. Not being able to communicate, by the way, is one of the main sources of frustration and tantrums in the second and third years of life (and why toddlers are so “terrible”). To me, preventing tantrums is most definitely a benefit of using signs with babies

Did you use signs with your baby? Did you find it helpful?

 

Are men the cause of women’s problems?

Photo Credit: lucianvenutian

I’m picking a relatively easy topic for this week, because I’m jet-lagged and tired and my brain is full of new ideas for research following the conference I came back from. There’s nothing easier than picking on something someone said and show how it makes no sense whatsoever. And one topic on which people say things that make no sense whatsoever is the “mommy wars”.

This is relatively old news, and I will admit that I have not read Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” yet. But about a month ago Lisa Belkin wrote about a survey done by MORE magazine that asked people about their financial security and about their views of working and stay-at-home moms. The magazine (according to Lisa, I could not access the article itself) argues that one of the causes of the “mommy wars” is that men send mixed signals to women. Quoting Lisa Belkin:

A related root cause, the survey found, was men. Twenty percent of the sample was male, and they report conflicted views of working and stay-at-home mothers. The latter, they say, are “better mothers” who are “happier” and have “better behaved kids.” The former, on the other hand, deserve “more respect,” “work harder” and “have a more exciting life.” When men are “sending conflicting signals,” Seymour says, “it would follow that women are responding to them. And instead of talking to the men around us, we’re taking it out on each other.

Here’s what I think about this (and why it made me a little bit mad). First of all, having positive things to say about both working and stay-at-home moms is not “conflicting views”. It’s appreciation of all moms. Second, even if men were sending conflicting signals, from this survey it does not “follow that women are responding to them” – that’s called a hypothesis. And lastly, even assuming women respond to these positive conflicting messages, how does that explain working moms and stay-at-home moms criticizing each other? If anything, it would follow that we should have respect for women who chose a different life than we did.

I agree with the editor-in-chief of MORE magazine that we have to talk about the issues. But for us to talk about the issues, they have to be issues first. Blaming men for sending “conflicting messages” doesn’t encourage frank and open discussion; it just makes everyone build their defenses a bit higher. And this just turned from “mommy wars” to “gender wars” for no reason at all.

This week’s assignment: talk to your partner about how they view working and stay-at-home parents. Feel free to post updates here

 

Stretching the Mind

Photo Credit: Joe Thorn

As promised, this post is about the most fascinating (I think) process that is typically included in Executive Functions: Cognitive Flexibility.

What is Cognitive Flexibility?

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to think about something in more than one way. For example, the child in the picture is thinking about the chair not as something to sit on (the original function), but as something to help her reach a higher shelf. This is a skill that plays an important role in problem solving (such as analogies – these problems are considered a measure of intelligence) and creativity (thinking about something in new ways, making connections between things that don’t seem to have a connection between them).

Consecutive Cognitive Flexibility (Switching)

In most research that looks at the development of cognitive flexibility in preschool-age children, researchers measure cognitive flexibility as the ability to switch between two dimensions. So, a very well-used task to measure cognitive flexibility in preschoolers gets kids to sort cards first according to colour, and then according to shape. These are the same cards, say, blue boats and red rabbits. So in order to sort them according to shape, children have to stop thinking about the cards in terms of colour (blue ones and red ones) and start thinking about them in terms of shape (boats and rabbits). Turns out that preschoolers are pretty terrible at this: most 3-year-olds and about half of the 4-year-olds reported in the literature are unable to switch, and keep sorting the cards according to the “old” dimension.

Concurrent Cognitive Flexibility (Simultaneous)

Another way to think about cognitive flexibility, however, is as a simultaneous process. This would entail thinking about a toy, for example, both as a red one and as a car at the same time (so, a red car). This is often considered to be a harder task than thinking about two dimensions consecutively (switching), and there are no tasks that measure this process in preschoolers. Which is where my research comes in.

In a study I will be presenting next week at a conference, we looked at preschoolers’ performance on a concurrent cognitive flexibility task. This task is based on the matrix completion task, which is used to measure concurrent cognitive flexibility in 7-year-olds. In this task, there is a board with three pictures, and the child is asked to “finish” the board with a fourth picture (see the picture below, honestly, in this case the picture is worth about 730 words). The most recent study that did this found that about half the 7-year-olds succeeded in this task. We made some minor changes to this task, and gave it to preschoolers. In our sample, about half the 4- and 5-year-olds succeeded.

This is a board from the new matrix task

The child has to pick one of these pictures to go in the empty cell in the board

What We Can Learn

Until now, no one even studied concurrent cognitive flexibility in preschoolers. Using our matrix completion task (and other tasks we have developed and can talk about later on), we can measure this skill. And when you can measure something, you can study it. So now comes the exciting part: studying the way this skill develops, looking at what causes children to do better or worse, and looking into ways to help children master this skill.

I would love to hear stories about flexibility in your kids (or kids you know). Seriously, tell me about that one time that your kid discovered that other people don’t call you “mommy” or “daddy” and realized that you actually have a name, stuff like that.

 

The Memory Game

Photo Credit: NesQuarX

So, after our in-depth exploration of inhibitory control and all it means, we are ready to plunge into the next construct that is typically a part of Executive Function. This process is the “updating” process, or working memory.

What is Working Memory?

Working memory is the ability to keep information in mind – and manipulate it. The manipulation part is important, because just keeping information in your head is called “short-term memory”. The classic example of short-term memory is looking up a phone number in the phone book and then repeating it over and over until you get to the phone and can dial it. It sounds like it’s something from the Stone Age, but when I was an undergraduate student that was the example that was used.

Measuring Working Memory

A classic working memory measure is the Backward Digit Span, a task taken from an IQ test. The experimenter says a string of digits, and the participant is asked to repeat it in a reversed order. For example, if the experimenter said 5-8-2, a correct answer would be 2-8-5. The idea is that you have both to remember the digits and manipulate the information (reverse the order). However, young children (3-year-olds) find this “game” very difficult. Even when there is a puppet that demonstrates how to do it, most of the studies I was involved with and in which we used backwards digit span, 3- and many 4-year-olds were really bad at this. In general, the older kids get, the better they are at working memory tasks in terms of capacity. That means that they can remember more pieces and manipulate them, not necessarily that they can do something different with those pieces.

Why is Working Memory an Executive Function?

The original structure of working memory included a “central executive” and two (recently three) sub-systems that are “enslaved” to the central executive. The two systems included a phonological loop (an auditory system – think about the example of the phone number) and a visual sketchpad to keep visual and spatial information. The idea is that the central executive manages those slave systems. So, according to that theory, the central executive does the “manipulation” part, and the slave systems do the “remembering” part.

The truth is that working memory is probably a process all on its own. If you recall, Executive Functions are processes that enable goal-directed behaviour. If working memory is included in this umbrella then other processes should be included as well. Take language, for example. You really can’t do any goal-directed behaviour without language in the same way that you can’t do any goal-directed behaviour without working memory. But working memory plays a role in all kinds of behaviours, and is probably a more “general” cognitive skill.

I know this was kind of technical, but working memory is an important component. Next time I’ll talk about cognitive flexibility, the most awesome process of all (and my research focus).

This time I would love to hear what you thought about the post. Too technical? Too simplified? Too boring?

 

The Marshmallow Task Revisited

Photo Credit: SliceOfChic

I know I have written about inhibitory control not very long ago, and that I’m technically in the middle of a series about Executive Functions, but this study came out fairly recently and I just can’t resist. Plus, I was giving a guest lecture for my supervisor the other day, and she showed the video in class and it’s really great.

The Marshmallow Task

So, remember I talked about the marshmallow task? It’s a delay of gratification (also known as inhibitory control – delay) task, in which 4-year-olds are told that they can eat one marshmallow now, or wait and get two marshmallows later. The original study was done in the 1970s, and the children have been followed up decades and decades later. It turns out that the longer a child could wait for that second marshmallow, the better he or she did on a host of outcome measures, including SAT scores and coping with stress.

Reliable Environment

There’s a new study out that looked at the roots of this ability to delay gratification. The researchers had the children first do an “art project” with a not-so-exciting array of crayons. The children were told that if they can wait, the researcher is going to get them a really nice art supplies set. What the researchers did was assign children randomly to one of two conditions. In the “reliable” condition, the researcher came back after 2.5 minutes with a really neat art supplies set. In the “unreliable” condition the researcher came back empty-handed and said she can’t find the art supplies. After they have established this “environmental” factor, they did the marshmallow task. They found a staggering effect – honestly, no one gets an effect this big. The amount of time (number of seconds) that children in the reliable condition waited for the second marshmallow was four times longer than the amount of time children in the unreliable condition waited.

The thing about this study is that it’s a very elegant way to examine environmental stability in the lab. If you care to generalize from this study, you could argue that children who grow up in an “unreliable” environment (i.e., when adults say they are going to do something but never do, for various reasons) experience those adults as unreliable. Therefore, when those adults tell them to wait, why should they? When adults tell them to save for the future, they see no reason to – in fact, the rational thing to do in an unstable environment is to consume your resources as soon as you have them.

What Can We Learn?

So what can we learn from this study? The most important thing, I would say, is to always keep your promises to children. It’s ok if something happens and you can’t go to the park even though you said you would, but if this research teaches us anything is that you have to try mighty hard to do as you say.

Do you remember broken promises? Do you think it affects your view of the person who broke the promise?