By Susan Johnson, Teacher
As a laboratory school for Stanford University, Bing is the site of innovative research on child development. Bing’s teachers and staff got a taste of the rich child development studies conducted at the school at Bing’s Staff Development Day on Oct. 10, 2014.
Assistant professor Hyowon Gweon, PhD, presented her research on social learning in children. Gweon had recently joined the Stanford Department of Psychology after completing her graduate work and postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. She won the APA award for the best dissertation in developmental psychology for her outstanding research. [See page 11 for more information.]
In addition, three Stanford students who have worked with children at Bing shared their research on how children realize what’s alive, how they respond to male vs. female voices, and the meaning of “no.”
Kara Weisman, a third-year doctoral student working with psychology professors Ellen Markman, PhD, and Carol Dweck, PhD, poses the question of sentience in children: “When do we know when we’re in the presence of a sentient creature?” In order to answer this question, she looks at affect (emotional experiences), autonomy (self-controlled behavior) and perception (sensory experiences). Weisman asks: “If a child learns that something has one of these properties, will that child infer that it also has the others?”
Weisman’s research reminds us of the often non-discrete distinction between sentient and non-sentient—reality versus imaginary—in childhood. This is particularly pertinent during the preschool years, as play is rich with fictional characters from stories, films, media and imaginative play.
In Weisman’s research, which included 64 participants, she showed children pictures of identical boxes while providing verbal cues about what sentient characteristics—affect, autonomy or perception—the hidden object in the box had. For example, a child might have heard, “This one feels sad.” Then, the children inferred whether the object would possess other sentient characteristics, or whether it was made of an inanimate material.
The study’s results support Weisman’s hypothesis that if children learn that something has one sentient characteristic—is happy or sad, for instance—they tend to think that it possesses additional sentient characteristics. Furthermore, children then infer that this thing is not made of inanimate materials.
Another study, conducted by Nicholas Moores, a Stanford senior working with Michael Frank, PhD, associate professor of psychology, looks at language acquisition. One question he asks is how children learn to integrate social knowledge with information gleaned from the nature of the speaker’s voice. He also looks at how this integration bears on the acquisition and perpetuation of gender stereotypes.
In his work at Bing, Moores showed children four images on a screen. The images were clear and simple, yet each image possessed some gender stereotype. Of the four images, two were the same color and the other two had object-related colors. For instance, one slide included a blue dart, blue-colored berries, a brown belt and a pink belt. Children then heard either a female or male voice saying, “Find my belt.”
The results show that 3-year-olds tend not to take into consideration the speaker’s gender, while 5-year-olds regularly do: A major shift occurs within those two years. The older children tend to get a pink belt for the female voice and a brown belt for the male voice.
Ann Nordmeyer, a fifth-year doctoral student also working with Frank, gave a talk on childrens’ and adults’ understanding of negation. Nordmeyer characterizes four types of negation between the ages of 12 and 24 months: refusal, self-prohibition, denial and nonexistence. As children participating in the study at Bing are generally over the age of 3, they have already acquired these four types of negation.
According to Nordmeyer, “Adults respond to negative sentences faster when they are presented within a supportive context.” Children don’t respond to context in the same way, she says. For her study, which included 48 children from Bing and 260 adults, Nordmeyer displayed a series of related images on an iPad. For instance, one image showed three plates with apples on them. Then, children saw an image of two plates—one with apples and one empty. Children were prompted with a sentence, such as “Bob has no apples.” Nordmeyer recorded which figure children chose, and the speed at which they did so. In other trials, Nordmeyer added additional variables, such as unrelated images.
When adults heard negative sentences such as “Bob has no apples,” Nordmeyer found they started to click the picture of the empty plate as soon as they heard the word “no,” suggesting that adults use negation to make predictions about the end of a sentence. Children, however, wait to hear the entire sentence before choosing a picture, suggesting that they do not make the same predictions as adults. Furthermore, children’s understanding of abstract words (like “no”) might be obscured by processing demands that overwhelm children.
The questions posed by Weisman, Moores and Nordmeyer encourage Bing teachers to reflect on elements of development: sentience, language, gender stereotypes and negation.