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[rivka]

I just signed Alex up for the research subject pool at Johns Hopkins' Laboratory for Child Development. They've already nabbed her for her first study, which is about how seven-month-olds process information related to numbers.

I explained to the woman who signed us up that I'm a researcher, and I've always thought it was good karma to help out with other people's studies. I made good use of the subject pool when I was a graduate student, and I always appreciated the parents who were pleasant and showed up when they said they would. But I also think that Alex will enjoy it. Developmental psychologists are pretty much always people who love babies and children, and they do a good job of making studies fun. Alex likes to go places and see things. It's probably going to be a match made in heaven.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

They've got a bunch of papers posted on their website. It's bringing back memories of my Cognitive Development course in grad school - one of these days, I've got to go up to the attic and dig out the readings for that class - and even more distant memories of Human Development courses in college.

I was in college, and taking Human Development, when this study came out:

In these experiments infants are shown simple arithmetic problems, and looking times to expected and unexpected outcomes are compared. Stimuli in these studies are small sets of real, three-dimensional objects. For example, in Wynn’s (1992) landmark study, infants saw a toy mouse on a stage that was then hidden by a screen. A hand carrying a second mouse entered, passed behind the screen, and emerged empty. Infants’ reasoning about this 1 + 1 event was probed by showing them the expected outcome of two mice vs the unexpected one mouse. Infants looked longer at the one-mouse display, suggesting that they expected that 1 + 1 = 2. Another group of infants saw a subtraction condition in which two mice appeared on stage and were hidden by the screen, and then a hand took one away. Infants again looked longer at the unexpected outcome (2–1 = 2). A 1 + 1 = 2 or 3 condition showed that infants expected exactly two, and not just "more than one."

I still remember the furor that study caused. Everyone thought there was no way it could be true, but it's since been replicated many, many times. I think Alex is just doing a number-habituation study, where they show her an array of the same number of objects until she gets bored with it, and then change the number of things displayed and see whether she notices the difference. Pity - the "math problem" studies are so much cooler. ;-)

[abbylee]

I love those studies. Especially when you compare them with the ones before hand that showed that three (?) year olds couldn't do that math, but it turned out that they really just wanted to please the person asking the question.