Here are a few of the research projects currently underway in the lab.
Understanding Relations Between Parent-Child Interactions and Children’s STEM Engagement and Learning
For more than a decade, we have been studying how children and parents play together – usually in children’s museums – and how that play relates to children’s learning about the exhibit. We are now translating that work to study parent-child interactions in many different environments and how such interaction during structured activities relates to children’s engagement with the activity and their learning about the activity. Our hypothesis is that children’s learning and engagement are different, and related to different aspects of children’s play and the ways parents play with them. In a related line of work, we are also curious about children’s exposure to role models and how such exposure affects their engagement and the ways in which they would explore novel environments in order to learn.
Children’s Understanding of Fair Resource Exchanges
There is a lot of research suggesting children expect resources to be distributed fairly. Our lab has shown that children endorse distributing resources to others equally when everyone starts with the same amount, and by the age of 7, distributing resources unequally to rectify initial inequities. In more recent research, we have shown similar results for the collection of resources. Resource collection is important because as adults, we live in a society in which resources are collected from us. The extent to which we endorse fair collection practices relates to our well-being and belief in a just world. Our studies look at how children expect resources to be collected from others, and whether those beliefs change over time and based on what the resources will be used for. We also look at how children think about the outcomes of resource exchanges, and conditions where unequal resource exchanges might or might not be acceptable.
How do Children Develop Scientific Reasoning Capacities?
Most of the early research in the lab demonstrated that young children – preschoolers and even infants = can engage in sophisticated forms of causal reasoning. We are now studying how these causal reasoning abilities relate to the ways children learn science, both in and out of school settings. One example is how children construct experiments to learn new pieces of information. We have shown that between the ages of 4-7, children develop causal reasoning capacities necessary to engage in scientific thinking, but they also need to develop metacognitive reasoning capacities in order to understand that they are doing science, and become more scientifically literate. Some of that metacognition is in the form of reflection, but other kinds of metacognition involve recognizing what role children’s own effort plays in their actions and learning. We are investigating both kinds of metacognitive development. Our goal with this line of work is to suggest better practices for teaching science to young children, both in and outside of the classroom.
The Role of Inhibition in Social Cognition
During (and after) the preschool years, children develop remarkable capacities for cognitive control – the ability to shift and focus attention, inhibit certain kinds of responses, and delay gratification for events. We have been investigating these capacities through a novel method called reach tracking. With both children and adults, we attach a small infrared sensor to participants’ fingers and trace the movement of their hand through 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 their understanding of numeracy and their social cognition. For example, 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults use different cognitive control systems when reasoning about whether a distribution of resources is fair.
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.