Fun with cognitive development.

Alex participated in another study at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory for Child Development this week. She's done this from time to time, and it's always a lot of fun. This time they were interested in the relationship between preschoolers' counting ability and their ability to compare quantities.

First they had Alex do some straight-up counting of animals on cards. Next they gave her cards with pictures of two kinds of animals interspersed. They asked her (for example) to count the giraffes, count the elephants, and then say whether most of the animals were giraffes or elephants.

If you'd asked me to predict the results before we entered the room, I would've said that Alex would do a decent job of counting but that she would have trouble making a relative comparison of quantities when the numbers were close. When I saw that the animals were scattered randomly across the card instead of being neatly lined up, I figured that she'd have trouble counting them accurately, too. (It's hard for a little kid to remember which ones they've already counted.) I was surprised to see that her ability to count a random array has significantly improved - she made two or three errors, but was only ever one off. And she didn't make any mistakes on the comparisons.

Afterward, the experimenter told me that so far (Alex was the 250-somethingth subject) they haven't found any relationship between counting ability and comparative estimation. Some kids are great counters but can't figure out which one has the most. Some kids can't really count very well at this age, but unfailingly say which are the most animals - even when it's a question of 8 versus 7. So it seems that these two number skills are completely separate developmental processes. Isn't that fascinating?

(Also fascinating, if you are a big old cognitive development geek: this paper (warning: PDF) reporting the results of the last study Alex was in, which shows how ridiculously good two-year-olds are at learning new words, even in challenging contexts.)

Last, but not least, there's been a new development this week that may have implications for this journal. Alex was hanging out by my side while I read LJ. I started to leave a comment in wiredferret's journal, and suddenly a little voice piped up, "Why did you write my name?" Oops. She's been able to recognize her name for a long time, but apparently now she's following along with my typing and picking out her name from a block of text. So that's a little... constraining.

(no subject)

This is just sick and sad.

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.

Police investigating the alleged attack, however, began to notice some inconsistencies in her story and administered a polygraph test.

Authorities, however, declined to release the results of that test.

Investigators did say that they received photos from the ATM machine and "the photographs were verified as not being the victim making the transaction."

This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.

The commander added that Todd will face charges; but police have not commented on what those charges will be.

That was really the only thing lacking in making this the most disgusting campaign of the modern era, wasn't it?

I hope that all the right-wing blogs which spread the story far and wide are posting prominent corrections even as we speak. Particularly including the president of the FOX network, who posted that the original story might lead Obama supporters to change their vote for reasons having nothing to do with racism. But I hope I'm not going to see any triumphalism about this from Democrats. This is not a story we should be pleased to relate.

This young woman is seriously disturbed. I hope she gets the help she needs. I hope this story will lead more people to a sober examination of the ugly undercurrents in our society that made her original claims seem believable to many. And I hope that will be the end of it.

(no subject)

I've signed up with the Obama campaign to go to Pennsylvania on Election Day, to help get out the vote. They've asked me to go to Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, which is a small conservative city in the southern part of the state. It's about 80 miles north of Baltimore.

The form e-mail I got assigning me to Harrisburg says that I'll either be canvassing or working the phones; I assume that on Election Day itself I'm more likely to be asked to work the phones, but it's possible that they'll still be going door to door even then.

So far I'm very impressed with their organization. They have a webpage aimed at "border state volunteers," people who live in safe blue or safe red states who want to travel someplace where the election will be close. They encouraged me to come for a four-day trip (and I wanted to!), but I was also free to sign up for whichever days I could actually travel. My field office match came complete with a link to a 16-page PDF booklet called the "PA Border States Volunteer Welcome Packet," which provided everything from the phone numbers and addresses of every field office in the state to a list of hotels offering discounted stays to a suggested packing list with wardrobe suggestions. The booklet also had a brief guide to the PA political scene and the parameters of the race in PA.

I was particularly struck by this:

Thanks to our hard work registering voters, there are currently 438,536 more registered Democrats in Pennsylvania than there were at the time of the election in 2004. Meanwhile, there are 175,472 fewer registered Republicans than in 2004. Democrats have nearly doubled their registration advantage of 580,208 voters in 2004 to 1,194,216 voters
through October 2008. The Obama campaign registered over 350,000 of these new Democrats.

I don't know how necessary I really am to the get-out-the-vote effort. Recent polls in Pennsylvania haven't been particularly close, for all that the McCain campaign has been insisting that they can win there. I guess I just want to feel like I've done my part, and there's not much I can do toward that end as a Maryland resident. Plus, I think it will be fun.

How about you, or at least, the Americans among you? Do you have Election Day plans? Do you live in a state where your vote might make a difference?