Health & Medicine
Preschoolers Know What They Don't Want, UC Davis Study Examines Reasoning in Toddlers
Kathleen Lees
First Posted: Mar 12, 2013 04:36 PM EDT
Children can certainly be feisty. They know what they want when they want it, no matter if it's the terrible twos or higher up on the toddler chart, and according to a recent study, children as young as three years old have the same feeling when they are uncertain about making a decision. That same feeling can be applied to guide decision making, according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis.
"There is behavioral evidence that they can do this, but the literature has assumed that until late preschool, children cannot introspect and make a decision based on that introspection," said Simona Ghetti, professor of psychology at UC Davis and co-author of the study with graduate student Kristen Lyons, now an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
The study focused on how reasoning, memory and cognition emerge during childhood. It is known that children get better at introspection through elementary school, and Lyons and Ghetti wanted to determine if this ability still existed in children.
Previous studies have used open-ended questions to find out how children feel about a decision, but that approach is limited by younger children's ability to report on the content of their mental activity, according to the study.
Instead, Lyons and Ghetti showed 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds ambiguous drawings of objects and asked them to point to a particular objects, ranging from a cup to a car. The children were then asked to point to a picture of two faces, and which ones they felt confident about. Children also had to choose a drawing even if they were unsure.
In a second tests, children had a "don't want to pick" option.
Across the age range, children were more likely to say they were not confident about their decision when they had in fact made a wrong choice. When they had a "don't know" option, they were most likely to take it if they had been unsure of their choice in the "either/or" test.
By opting not to choose when uncertain, the children could improve their overall accuracy on the test.
Researchers report that they hope the study on younger children will examine the way reasoning functions in youth. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.
The findings are published online by the journal Child Development and will appear in print in an upcoming issue.
See Now:
NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone
©2024 ScienceWorldReport.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The window to the world of science news.
More on SCIENCEwr
First Posted: Mar 12, 2013 04:36 PM EDT
Children can certainly be feisty. They know what they want when they want it, no matter if it's the terrible twos or higher up on the toddler chart, and according to a recent study, children as young as three years old have the same feeling when they are uncertain about making a decision. That same feeling can be applied to guide decision making, according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis.
"There is behavioral evidence that they can do this, but the literature has assumed that until late preschool, children cannot introspect and make a decision based on that introspection," said Simona Ghetti, professor of psychology at UC Davis and co-author of the study with graduate student Kristen Lyons, now an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
The study focused on how reasoning, memory and cognition emerge during childhood. It is known that children get better at introspection through elementary school, and Lyons and Ghetti wanted to determine if this ability still existed in children.
Previous studies have used open-ended questions to find out how children feel about a decision, but that approach is limited by younger children's ability to report on the content of their mental activity, according to the study.
Instead, Lyons and Ghetti showed 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds ambiguous drawings of objects and asked them to point to a particular objects, ranging from a cup to a car. The children were then asked to point to a picture of two faces, and which ones they felt confident about. Children also had to choose a drawing even if they were unsure.
In a second tests, children had a "don't want to pick" option.
Across the age range, children were more likely to say they were not confident about their decision when they had in fact made a wrong choice. When they had a "don't know" option, they were most likely to take it if they had been unsure of their choice in the "either/or" test.
By opting not to choose when uncertain, the children could improve their overall accuracy on the test.
Researchers report that they hope the study on younger children will examine the way reasoning functions in youth. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.
The findings are published online by the journal Child Development and will appear in print in an upcoming issue.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone