An article in LiveScience  reports:

Toddlers (do) listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.

“I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings,” said psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “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.”

“For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,” Chatham explained. “You might expect the child to plan for the future, think ‘OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.’ But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.”

But let’s look at that, in the context of other cognitive findings.  I’d highlight ten points:

1) Abstracting the experience: A three year old’s brain is learning to abstract elements of the experience.

2) Associative modeling:   The child compares a new experience to stored models (i.e., generalizations, abstractions) – an associative “this is like / not-like” comparison.

3) Time:  The kid’s temporal sense is still developing:  differentiating now-versus-future.  Think back further to babies enjoying presence-absence -  a.k.a. peek-a-boo play.

4) Linear sense of time – To plan, is to arrange objects along a single-line time sequence.   Planning is not an innate skill, and should be learned before the teen years.   Planning and patience both require the deliberative discipline  of “not-now-but-later”.

5) Models - The child’s brain sorts experiences to build models for analyzing and making decisions.    Faced with an unfamiliar situation,  she hesitates. Is it her deliberative mind racing to sort the data to a best-fit from among the many logic models kept on on the prefrontal cortex shelf? Or is it frozen fear?   Discern the natural inclination, and balance out the impulse, the emotion, the hesitation, the caution.

Some kids  thrive on instantaneous reactions. If gifted with good eye-motor synchrony as well,  she ‘s a formidable soccer forward.   It takes a longer route for the sensory signals to travel and return from logical analysis.  That momentary hesitation could lose the advantage, and this is why all animals do profile for friends or foes.  to the are simply overwhelmed as the brain tries to analyze the flood of sensory input.   Natural

Take the time to tie it to the why  Let’s… because…”.   There’s a time to assert parental authority, no doubt, but when parents dismiss questions with a “because I said so”,  it becomes power politics,  doesn’t it.

6) Decisions: The kid’s ability to make logical (causal) predictions (decisions) depends on its yet developing sophistication to decide if the stored model fits the situation.

7) Creativity: The child’s mind wants to explore and learn – i.e., test its models, change the models, create new models, or go out into the cold without that prescribed coat.

Our role: We should encourage play and provide an emotionally safe environment for the experimentation – i.e., the child’s intellect to develop.

9) Under the hood: The brain’s prefrontal cortex abstracts experiences and constructs a logical model: If this, then this. Alternatively, the amygdala might create an emotional model – especially from traumatic situations – for a more visceral or instantaneous reaction.

10) “Intuition” is the sophisticated ability to make a decision by quickly retrieving the best-fit model for that situation; BTW, consider how your sensibility might change if the English language did not have a future verb tense: then, consider that the Japanese language doesn’t!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

This entry was posted Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 11:20 am and is filed under Brain Aspects of Decision Making. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.