For parents who have found themselves repeating the same warnings or directions to their toddler over and over to no avail, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder offers them an answer as to why their toddlers don't listen to their advice: they're just storing it away for later.
Scientists -- and many parents -- have long believed that children's brains operate like those of little adults. The thinking was that over time kids learn things like proactively planning for and understanding how actions in the present affect them in the future. But the new study suggests that this is not the case.
"The good news is what we're saying to our kids doesn't go in one ear and out the other, like people might have thought," said CU-Boulder psychology Professor Yuko Munakata, who conducted the study with CU doctoral student Christopher Chatham and Michael Frank of Brown University. "It also doesn't go in and then get put into action like it does with adults. But rather it goes in and gets stored away for later."
A paper on their study titled "Pupillometric and Behavioral Markers of a Developmental Shift in the Temporal Dynamics of Cognitive Control" will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 23.
"I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings," said Munakata. "There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different."
During the study, the CU-Boulder researchers used a computer game designed for children, and a technique known as pupillometry -- a process that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine the mental effort of the child -- to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds.
The computer game involved teaching children simple rules about two cartoon characters -- Blue from Blue's Clues and SpongeBob Squarepants -- and their preferences for different objects. In the directions for the game, children were told that Blue likes watermelon, so they were to press the happy face on the computer screen only when they saw Blue followed by a watermelon. When SpongeBob appeared, they were told to press the sad face on the screen.
"The older kids found this sequence easy, because they can anticipate the answer before the object appears," Chatham said. "But preschoolers fail to anticipate in this way. Instead, they slow down and exert mental effort after being presented with the watermelon, as if they're thinking back to the character they had seen only after the fact."