Lab Director: Dr. Judy DeLoache
Gilmer Hall
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RESEARCH PROJECTS

As young children explore the world, we also want to explore theirs. In the CSC, we are always busy conducting several different studies on development in the first few years of life.  Almost all of our studies focus on cognitive development, and many are designed to tell us more about how young children come to understand and use symbols.  Here are some of the projects that are currently under way in the lab.


Very Young Children's Interest in Animals

Anyone who has spent any time with young children would have a difficult time denying the fascination young children, from very early in development, have with animals. How often have you encountered an infant falling out of his stroller to get a closer look at a dog, how many outings have been delayed over an infants’ fascination with a squirrel or bird on the side of the road? The goal of this research is to establish and explore the nature of children’s fascination with animals by observing children’s interactions with animals. In one study, we are simply observing children’s reactions to animals they encounter “on the streets,” in an attempt to quantify the behaviors of those children who fall out of their strollers to see the dogs. In another study, we will have animals set up in the lab and we will observe whether children notice and respond to the animals during their normal warm-up periods for other studies. These studies will help establish a foundation for our understanding of the development of children’s fascination with animals.
                                                                                              
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Preparedness Studies

According to the theory of prepared learning, phobias are developed to a non-random set of objects, and humans and other primates most readily learn to fear classes of threats, such as snakes, that were recurrent throughout evolutionary history. Recently, Dr. DeLoache and graduate student Vanessa LoBue inaugurated a program of research examining preparedness in children. Research with infants and young children who have little to no experience with snakes is crucial to testing the relevance of the theory in humans. We found that infants match the image of a moving snake with the sound of a fearful voice while matching the image of a non-snake with a happy voice. Thus, babies find something natural about the relation between a frightened voice and a snake. Currently, we are further investigating this idea by looking at the specific features of snakes that lead to this differential responding.

The prepared learning view also suggests that we may be prepared to quickly detect the presence of some threatening objects more quickly than objects that are harmless. In our lab, we have found that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds detect the presence of snakes more quickly than flowers, frogs, and caterpillars. The prepared learning account would predict the same result for the detection of threatening facial expressions, since they are clear signs of hostility. In our lab, we have also shown that children detect the presence of threatening faces, such as angry or fearful faces, more quickly than happy or neutral faces.

The results of these experiments provide especially strong support for the preparedness view, and further research will lead to important information about the origins of intense fears and phobias more generally.
                                                                                              
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Children's Use of Models

One of the most important areas of development for young children is to figure out the wide range of symbolic objects that are important in our daily lives.  Young children frequently encounter pictures, replica toys, models, and a variety of other objects that stand for something other than themselves.  In some studies, we examine whether toddlers understand the relation between a scale model and a full-sized room.  To do so, we hide a miniature toy in the model while the child watches, and then we ask the child to find a larger toy that is hidden in the corresponding place in the room. 


Our research has shown that it is surprisingly difficult for young children to appreciate the relation between the room and model.  Even though they remember where the miniature toy is in the model, they often don’t have any idea where the larger one is in the room. 


Knowing more about what helps young children appreciate the relation between a symbol and what it stands for should be useful for promoting other symbolic activities, such as reading and doing math.
                                                                                              
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Scale Errors  

We have recently documented something that has never before been reported in the scientific literature (although you may have observed it in your own home).  After repeatedly seeing toddlers try to sit down on a tiny chair in a scale model in the lab, we decided to study this remarkable behavior.  We now have considerable evidence (on videotape) that toddlers sometimes misestimate, to an astonishing degree, the relation between the size of their own body and an object.

In this research, children between 18 and 30 months come to the lab and play with some large toys—a car they can get into, a chair they can sit in, and a slide they can climb up and go down.  Then, while the child is out of the room, these large objects are replaced with miniature replicas exactly like them except for size.

We find that children often try to perform the same actions on the miniature objects that they had done with the full-sized ones: They try to get into the miniature car and to go down the tiny slide.  This research tells us that young children’s knowledge about objects and what you do with them sometimes causes them to lose track of the fundamental difference between the real object and a replica.  In the coming year, we plan to do several studies that we hope will give us a better understanding of this very intriguing aspect of young children’s behavior.

Click
here to see children participating in this study.  Each child is trying unsuccessfully to play on a toy that is too small!

Parents, visit www.childbehaviorsurvey.com for an interesting survey designed to find out how common scale errors are. Responding to the survey should only take a few minutes and would provide us with very important information!.
                                                                                              
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Learning from Picture Books: Infants and Toddlers

Most parents assume that their infants and toddlers learn a great deal from their experience with picturebooks.  They expect, for example, that after hours of conversation about pictures of zoo animals that their children have never seen, the children will recognize and know something about those animals on their first trip to a zoo.  However, surprisingly little research has been done on this important topic. 

We are currently studying what young children learn through picturebook interactions with adults, and we are particularly interested in their ability to apply what they learn to the real world. In some of the studies, children look at books containing some pictures of novel objects along with pictures of familiar ones, and the research assistant labels and talks about all the pictures. We then show the children real versions of the novel objects to see if they transfer what they learned from the book to the real objects. In other studies, we are interested in whether children recognize that objects in pictures not only share the same label as the real world object but also share the same properties. For example, children read a book about a puppet who plays with a ball that lights up and a box that does nothing when he shakes it. After reading the book, the child sees the objects that were depicted in the book and has to indicate which one lights up.  

We have an extensive series of studies planned on this general topic.For example, we are interested in whether children learn about labels, properties, and information better from pictures or from real objects. Also, we want to know whether children can transfer what they learn from pictures to objects and vice versa. Additionally, varying the time between the picture book exposure and the transfer test will enable us to find out how long children can remember information they just learned from a book. Varying how realistic the pictures are tell us if children are more likely to recognize a real object after seeing a realistic color photo versus a simple line drawing like those in many children’s books. We also plan to examine how fantasy context (dogs driving cars, children riding on flying carpets) affects what children learn from a book.

Learning from Picture Books: Young Children


Choosing the appropriate children’s book can be a difficult task. Children’s books targeted towards preschool-aged children incorporate many different features such as pop-up elements and cartoon pictures. Although it is important for books to appeal to young children, it is also possible that overly elaborate aesthetic features may distract children from learning the material in the books. We are interested in exploring what specific features may be helpful or distracting to young children when it comes to learning.

Thus far, we have found that 2.5- 3 year-olds learn alphabet letters and numbers better when they are taught with a book that is relatively plain in presentation than from books that have extraneous features, specifically pop-up and complex pictures. We are interested in exploring this research further by seeing if parents approach reading these various types of books differently. Perhaps they would read a pop-up book more for entertainment and a plain book more for teaching. We are also investigating if pop-up features are more helpful for learning other types of information, such as picture recognition and factual information. Knowing what features are appropriate for different functions is essential to how we educate young children.


Because many young children--from infants to preschoolers--spend a great deal of time in picture book interactions with parents, siblings, and teachers, it should be valuable to know more about what helps them to learn from those experiences.

                                                                                              
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Displaced References

When an infant who has little or no productive speech hears the name of a familiar person ("Where is daddy?") or object ("Where is your ball?"), does hearing that word brings its referent to mind?  The ability to represent objects through words and to think about objects in their absence takes us beyond here-and-now and has an important role in communication.  

 The present research examines whether children can comprehend references to absent objects before they can make such utterances in speech.  Infants may display their understanding of references to absent objects through nonverbal behaviors.

In some of the studies, children play with a stuffed animal for about 5 minutes and they are taught a name for the animal.  Then the stuffed animal is put out of view behind a couch.  Then we sit down with the child and we read a book about the out-of-view animal.  We want to see whether children direct behaviors (e.g., looking, pointing, searching for) toward the absent animal when they hear the name of the animal.  This research will help us understand children's symbolic development of language. 

                                                  
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Beliefs about Physical Transformations

Although even infants understand a great deal about the physical world, we have been discovering that older (preschool and early elementary school) children are surprisingly willing to believe that all sorts of impossible transformations can actually occur. In previous research in our lab, children watched as an experimenter demonstrated that either a highly technical looking machine or a decorated cardboard box could transform toys in a variety of impossible ways, making big toys turn little and turning toys and pictures into real objects.  To find out what the children actually believe about what they see the machine appear to do, the parent who accompanies them to our lab asks them questions about their session with the “transformation machine.” We have found that until seven, children are willing to believe that the machine can transform the toys and until six that the box can. Using a similar procedure we are currently exploring whether children are willing to believe that the transformation machine can make live animals transform in a number of impossible ways. We are interested in whether children are more willing to believe that animals or inanimate objects can undergo such transformations. We are also currently exploring just how much children have to see to be convinced. For example, would children be willing to believe the transformations are possible if they just hear about them but do not see them actually occur?

This research is helping us understand more about the development of children’s beliefs about reality.
                                                                                               
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