Here are a few of the research projects currently underway in the lab.
Relations between Explanation and Exploration in Parent/Child Interaction and Learning in Museum Settings
Young children are naturally curious. Children’s museums are a great arena to examine children’s curiosity in the form of how they explore the world and how they generate and understand explanations. We are investigating how children’s and parent’s explanations and explorations of museum exhibits relate to their STEM learning and engagement (sponsored by this grant from NSF). We are interested in how aspects of parents’ interaction with children relate to their STEM engagement and learning in inform settings.
In 2017, we won a second grant to investigate the role of belief revision in children’s exploration of museum exhibits, and how their ability to reflect on their belief revision and exploration relates to their understanding of themselves as learners. A lot of this research is still underway.
Causal and Scientific Reasoning
There is a long line of work suggesting that young children and even infants understand causality and can make sophisticated causal inferences. There is an equally long line of work suggesting that elementary school children are quite poor at scientific reasoning and inference. Given that causal and scientific reasoning often involve similar cognitive processes, a fundamental question is why is there this gap in children’s abilities. We are interested in how children engage in hypothesis formation and belief revision. Funded by this grant from NSF, we are examining these issues in both the laboratory, but also in the ways in which children explore museum environments.
Reach Tracking and the Role of Inhibition in Social Cognition
During (and after) the preschool years, children develop remarkable capacities forcognitive control – the ability to shift and focus attention, inhibit certain kinds of responses, and delay gratification for events. In collaboration with Joo-Hyun Song , the lab examines these developmental capacities using a technique called reach tracking, in which we trace children’s hand movements through 3D space while they respond to questions. In a series of papers, we have shown that the speed and trajectory with which children make responses provides us with insight into children’s developing cognitive control. More recently, we have begun investigations into the way in which these cognitive control capacities relate to other aspects of cognitive development, like numerical cognition. Funding by this grant from NSF, we are now investigating how different cognitive control mechanisms relate to children’s developing social cognition, particularly their understanding of others’ mental states, distinctions between fantasy and reality, their ability to learn from others, and their understanding of fairness.
Learning from Others
Young children learn a great deal about the world from their observation and interactions with events. But there is so much knowledge and so little time to discover it all, that children must also learn from other people. We examine the ways in which children learn from others and what they know about learning and teaching in general. A large amount of this work focuses on what we call “Rational Social Learning” – the hypothesis that young children use their existing knowledge of the world to appreciate whom to trust when learning new information and how to evaluate new information others generate. Many of the experiments in the lab are designed with this hypothesis in mind, investigating both the origins of learning from others, and the limits of children’s capacities.
Children’s Understanding of Fairness and Social Behavior
Young children are naturally inclined to treat others equally. When children observe inequity, they both point out unfairness, and go out of their way to restore balance. The lab is interested in the mechanisms behind perceiving fairness and rectifying inequities. To do so, we look at children’s understanding of intentionality, defiance, and value when dividing resources or determining whether they should share resources with another person.
Pretense and Fantasy
Preschoolers engage in a great deal of pretend play, and there are huge individual differences in both the quality and quantity of children pretending. The lab examines how children engage in pretend play and what they know about pretending? In more recent work, we have extended our investigation to how children understand stories and fictional worlds, and how that understanding might constrain what they can learn from fiction. We are also interested in the relation between play in general and learning, whether children (and parents) recognize that one can learn from play. Finally, we explore what role imagination and fiction might have in children’s causal and scientific reasoning.