Saturday, October 31, 2009

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

No Virginia, watching TV won't make your baby smarter.

As mentioned in class today, the Walt Disney Company has admitted that watching television will not make your baby smarter, although it may be an interesting segue way into a discussion of mental illness and an effective means of torture for adults.  As it turns out, the use of videos targeted for young children may actually be negatively related to language development and problems with attention.

So, if you bought your child some Baby Einstein videos and were disappointed with the results, here's how to get your money back.

Happy viewing.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Bubbles on your Tongue

How taste works is somewhat unclear, and a lot of work remains to be done in order to really figure it out.  There are hints however, and we keep finding out new things.  For example, this recent study suggests that carbonation - the fizzy bubbles found in many drinks - has a taste.  It's not just the sensation of the bubbles popping on your tongue, it's a flavor.  And that flavor?  Most akin to sour.

Here's something even stranger.  For years people have worked on how to restore sight to the blind.  In this new technique, special sunglasses attached to a "lollipop" are used to transduce visual signals into electrical stimulation on the tongue.  Users report a sensation similar to champagne bubbles on the tongue, and with some practice, can start to interpret some limited visual information.

And we're all familiar with the idea that we have certain taste receptors - including sweet, salty, sour and bitter. But there's a more recently identified taste (in addition to the new work on carbonation).  There is a savory flavor called umami. It's found in soups, cheese, seafood and meat.  It's a naturally occurring flavor, however a form of it (MSG) is often used as an additive in foods.




And then to end with, an essay on food and flavor by one of my favorite authors, Michael Pollan.  He writes about the health value of food and agriculture and the shared history of humans and plants.  And in this short article, about how we should be enjoying food, and how so much of what is sold in the supermarkets today really isn't food anymore.  

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Gone until Monday!

Well go figure.  It's available online.  With subtitles that aren't in English, but still.  If you miss class, you can watch it here.


via videosift.com

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Play with rules

So in class today I showed this video on the Marshmallow Test - a replication of a classic experiment conducted by Walter Mischel.



It shows a bunch of kids trying not to eat a marshmallow now in order to get two marshmallows later.  This ability to hold back from an enticing action and to distract oneself from temptation is part of what is known  as self-control, and is closely related to self-regulation.

Generally skills such as these are part of what psychologists call executive functioning.  Executive functioning involves goal-directed mental activity, or the control of thoughts, emotions, actions and strategies to accomplish goals and solve problems.  Children develop many of these abilities between the ages of about 2-5 years of age, and we'll be talking about the development of things like selective attention, inhibition of responses and theory of mind later in the quarter.  As it turns out (as proposed in this recent article in the New York Times) a subset of executive functioning - the ability to self-regulate - may be important for later academic success.

The Times article intersects with a number of the issues we'll be talking about in the next week.  First off is the question of nature and nurture.  Is the ability to self-regulate something we are born with, and that some people have more of and some people have less of, or is it the result of learning processes in those early years of life?  Different people have different opinions.  Generally, people have had limited success in designing programs that lead to any long term changes in self-control, suggesting that these abilities are not terribly malleable, and that self-control is more affected by the nature side of things.  However, the Times article discusses a new "Tools of the Mind" immersive approach currently being tested with preschoolers that seems to be meeting with greater success, suggesting that nurture may play a larger role than previously believed.

The article also discusses a conflict between different theoretical perspectives, and illustrates quite nicely how the theories that people have play out in real life.  Most educational experiences with young children aim to motivate children with a system of rewards (e.g. stickers and praise for desired behaviors) and punishments (e.g. time out for inappropriate behaviors).  This is closely linked to the learning perspective with its focus on environmental contingencies as the major shapers of development.  And, as the Times writer points out, some people have theorized that this leads to a focus on performing behaviors not because you are internally motivated to do so, but to gain the approval of others, and that what children are learning is more akin to obedience than it is to self-regulation.

The new immersive approach described in the Times article borrows heavily from a far different approach - Vygotsky's sociocultural theory.  Vygotsky focused on the interactions with others, and the ways in which more sophisticated interaction partners can support and guide your development.  We'll be talking about him in more detail (he's one of my favorites), but for now I will just point out in that in in the self-control program discussed in the article, it is assumed that much of learning will occur via peer pressure in pretend play (e.g. "You're doing it wrong!  Do it this way! Like this!") or via guidance and scaffolding provided by teachers (e.g. coaching, learning conferences).  And, hopefully what is imparted here is not just obedience to rules and the receipt of praise, but also the ability to regulate your thoughts and behavior for yourself at a later point.

I like this article because I think it touched on a variety of important things, some of which are outlined above. But I also like this article for another reason - it touched upon the importance of play.  It's my firm belief that we learn many of our most important skills through the context of play. In the U.S. I think many people tend to focus on academics - which I'm clearly in favor of and are clearly important - but too much.  Children need to play, they are driven to it relentlessly, they love it, they will play given the slightest opportunity to do so, and  it is found everywhere across the world and in most animal species as well.  That gives me an indication of how important it is, and I like to see others agree.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

The Interrelationships Between Domains

Hi all,

We won't be covering Chapter 5, on health and physical development, and so we don't talk very much about motor development.  This is not because I think it's not interesting, because it is, or because it's not important, which it also is, but because in the 3 month time span we are given to cover the entirety of human development, some things get cut.  And that's my cut.

So, I want to talk a bit here about motor development, specifically, about the relationships early motor development has with development in other areas.  But before I do I want to digress here for a moment and talk about an important concept - the interrelationships between domains of development.

There are many ways to think about development.  You might conceptualize development as quantitative or qualitative, and you might study it using a variety of different research methodologies designed to capture change over time.  But those aren't the only ways.  We can also focus on development either as happening in concert across all areas simultaneously and focus on age as the relevant variable, or we can think about development in one area and focus on that particular area and how it changes over time.  Neither is right or wrong, they are just useful for different reasons.

You may have noticed our book is topically oriented.  That means that it is organized by topic area (e.g., cognition, language) rather than chronologically (i.e., by age).  Generally, the argument for chronologically oriented books is that you cannot understand how one area develops without understanding what other areas are doing at the same time.  I myself prefer the more linear organization of the topical approach for teaching, but I think the concept of interrelationships is really really important.

So, going back to motor development, let's talk about interrelationships.  I think it's a particularly apt area to illustrate the point.  When an infant is born it can be likened to "a three-pound bag of loose corn; the baby has about as much motor control as the sack of kernels" (Wingert & Underwood, 1997).  Newborns are all clumsy movement and flailing limbs and slobber; they have a variety of reflexes designed to help them adjust and adapt to life on the outside, but when it comes to voluntary motor movements, they are pretty helpless.  What happens when they gain control of their bodies?

Think about cognitive development.  One of the things that is good for cognitive development is exposure to new things and experiences, and an environment that affords exploration and discovery.  But if the only motor movement you can actually do is to lift your head for a few brief seconds, the amount of exploration and discovery you can access is limited.

By contrast, if you can do this there's a lot more you can explore in your environment, and a whole lot more you can learn.  So, advances in motor development lead to advances in cognitive development because they open up a whole new world of exploration.

Now let's consider language.  There are lots of components to language, but one of the ways that we break those up is in into receptive (what you understand) and expressive (what you can say) language.  Once children can speak and be understood, they can use language to frame questions about the world and ask for answers to those questions.  But to be able to speak they need to be able to manipulate their lungs, throat, mouth, tongue and nasal cavity, and to continually modify this as their body changes and grows.  While certainly all the cognitive machinery needs to be in place before the child can know what he or she wants to say, it's also true that the motor component of language is a challenge.  It's no surprise that many toddlers have lisps or leave sounds off words or simplify their speech - talking is hard.  But once you have the motor coordination to speak intelligibly, then you can ask questions and learn from the answers.  And once you can learn from your answers, then this feeds into cognitive development too.

What about emotional development?  Motor development, as it happens, seems to be related to the development of a number of very specific fears.  In particular, the advent of self-propelled locomotion - most typically crawling - is important.  For example, at about the age of 6-9 months or so, many babies start showing stranger anxiety (a marked wariness or fear in response to strangers).  Why at this time?  Well, generally, stranger anxiety is tied to the attachment system.  And, another component of the attachment system - indeed the primary function of it - is proximity maintenance (that's just a fancy way of saying "stay close to mommy").  What happens is that just at the same time that babies become capable of crawling away from their caregivers, all of a sudden they are strongly motivated not to do so.  And, a consequence of the attachment system being turned on in this way is stranger anxiety.  So, being scared of strange people is therefore linked to being able to crawl, even though it seems like those things are miles apart on the surface.

I could go on and on with more examples, but I'll stop there.  I think the point is made. These interrelationships between domains, in my opinion at least, are most salient at the beginning of life, as children increase in complexity and organization, and at the end of life, as abilities sometimes decline in concert.   But they are always interacting and changing and feeding into each other in big loops of causal effects, like a giant spiderweb growing out in widening circles, where one rung of development is necessarily constrained and affected by what is going on in the rest of the web.  It's really quite amazing.