Can my son resist . . . "THE MARSHMALLOW'?

This week in lecture we have focused on the concept of "delayed gratification."  To put it simply, delayed gratification is the ability to resist immediate pleasure gain in the moment with the goal of a larger reward in the future.

One of the most famous experiments to test children's ability to delay gratification is the "Marshmallow Experiments" of Walter Mischel.  In his experiments, Mischel left children alone with a marshmallow on a plate for a certain period of time.  He told the children that if they could wait and not eat the marshmallow on the plate until he came back, then they could have two marshmallows.  A video of the experiment can be seen below:

If they ate the marshmallow on their plate before the end of their time, they would only get the one.  Mischel has found the the ability to wait for the second marshmallow in early childhood (age 3-5) predicts many benefits later in life, from better academic and professional success to lower body mass.

Because my son is 5 years old, and within the age group that Mischel has frequently tested, I thought it might be fun and interesting to have him try the Marshmallow Experiment at home.

Doing the test at home, I wasn't able to completely re-create the experiment properly, but I did my best. I placed one marshmallow on a plate and had my son go into another room (not his own room full of toys) and explained the procedure to him.  I told him I was going to leave the room for a while.  He could eat the marshmallow now, if he wanted.  But, if he could wait and not eat it until I came back, he could have two marshmallows.  I then left him alone in the room with the door closed for 15 minutes, quickly checking in once at the half-way point.

Because this test has been shown to be such a big indicator of future success in life, I was a bit nervous to see the results.  Because I didn't have access to a room with a one-way viewing mirror like the one used in the experiments, I didn't know the result until I opened the door.

When I went in, the marshmallow was still on the plate, and my son seemed very pleased with himself. After he had eaten his two marshmallows, I asked my son how he was able to resist eating the marshmallow.  I was dependent on an interview with my son after the test, since I was unable to see him during the course of the experiment.

My son said that he had resisted eating the marshmallow by moving to a different location in the room and turning away from the marshmallow so he couldn't see it.  He also reported that he distracted himself by looking at other things in the room and singing a song.  These sort of techniques for avoiding temptation are referred to my Mischel as "Strategic Allocation of Attention."

In the end, it was very "gratifying" to know that my son has learned some strategies for self-control.

Self-efficacy through LEGO

While the video above provides a cute bit of LEGO animation about the attributes and attainment of self-efficacy, my own parenting experience has shown that the simple act of playing and building with LEGO toys can be a powerful tool in a child's development of self-efficacy.

My oldest child is 5 years old and he is a "LEGO Maniac," to quote a popular phrase from LEGO advertising from my childhood days.  Examining my son's development in terms of Erikson's Psychosocial Stages, he falls the 3rd stage "Initiate vs. Guilt and the 4th stage, "Industry vs. Inferiority."

An important keystone in development at the 3rd, and mainly the 4th stage is the development of self-efficacy.  This is the ability of the child to take initiative and assert themselves successfully in socially acceptable ways.  The development of self-efficacy is also a vital aspect of Albert Bandura's Social Learning Theory.  In Bandura's own words:  "Persons who have a strong sense of efficacy deploy their attention and effort to the demands of the situation and are spurred by obstacles to greater effort."

• Albert Bandura (1982). "Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency". American Psychologist 37 (2): 122-147. ISSN 0003-066X.DOI:10.1037/0003-066X.37.2.122. (p. 123) (appears also in Bandura's Social Foundations of Thought and Action, 1986, p. 394)

Although there are many building toys that might make development of self-efficacy possible, there is something specific about the various products produced by LEGO that are particularly effective at facilitating this process.  Perhaps most important is the way that pre-designed LEGO sets provide opportunities for "Mastery Experiences."  The projects are coded for their age appropriateness and include very clear and precise directions that allow children to build complicated toys and structures almost completely by themselves.  To watch a child progress from a worried expression as they contemplate the complex structure on the front of the box, to intense concentration as they examine the directions and search for the correct parts, to pride as they examine their finished product is almost as fulfilling for a parent as the actual building is for the child.  

The use of LEGO as a tool for the development of self-efficacy has even spread into academic research, and even the LEGO corporation has developed it's own LEGO Learning Institute for the study of the interaction between play and learning.

The sense of mastery and self-efficacy that my son has learned from pre-designed sets is beginning to give him the confidence and inspiration to design and build his own creations.  Where once he would simply sit and stare at a pile of confusing and intimidating blocks, he now jumps right in and begins to build his own creations.

Peer Learning

As I've mentioned in previous posts, my son is currently in Kindergarten at a public charter school here in Brooklyn.  This is an incredibly exciting time for all of us.  Watching our son grow and develop intellectually and socially is a very rewarding, if slightly bittersweet, part of all of our interactions.

In contrast to my time in elementary school, when Kindergarten was only a half-day, and consisted mainly of playtime and arts & crafts, my son's Kindergarten lasts all day and has a rigorous curriculum with various assignments and homework.

My son's birthday falls in October, and according the the NYC Dept of Educations rules, he is expected to start Kindergarten when he is only four years old.  My wife and I were a bit worried how our son might develop to the more rigorous curriculum he would be facing in Kindergarten.  Although he had done well in his pre-school and seemed to have the verbal and spatial skills to handle it, we were worried that he was still to immature to display the "Concrete Operational" skills that are required of today's Kindergarten students.

The "Concrete Operational Stage" is a stage in the framework of cognitive development created by Jean Piaget.  This stage is generally considered to begin around age 6, and is a stage where children begin to develop more logical thought process, especially in relation to problems of operations and conservation.

Our worries for our son seemed to be well founded at our first parent-teacher conference when it was revealed that he was performing mostly at an average to slightly below average level.  However, within the space of a month or two we found that his academic performance began to increase by leaps and bounds.

What could have been the source for this rapid improvement?  Not by coincidence, at this same time our son had formed a close friendship with one particular classmate.  This classmate was a very high performing student who had scored very highly on Gifted and Talented exams and was reading well above his grade level.  All of a sudden, it was as if potential skills that had been lying dormant for our son were finally awoken.

Our son's rapid improvement was mainly the process of "Peer Learning," or learning that occurs amongst a cohort.  In Piaget's theory, Peer Learning works by challenging a child to reconcile his mistaken thoughts and theories about the world.  When coming into contact with other children with advanced understanding that allows them to operate more effectively in the world, a child is forced to reconsider their previous misunderstandings and develop new, more accurate ones.  Piaget termed this process sociocognitive conflict.

As our son's academic skills have advanced, he has, for the most part, achieved parity with the highest performing students of his class and has developed a separate cohort with them.  Peer learning continues to be vital to his academic progress, but its nature has now changed.  Currently, his Peer Learning experience more closely resembles the theories developed by Lev Vygotsky.  In contrast with
Piaget, Vygotsky saw cognitive development as inseparable from one's social environment.  When it came to education, Vygotsky believed that "Peer Collaboration" was most important.  Rather than being a situation of teacher-student or mentor-mentee, where information is transmitted vertically, Peer Collaboration works best when children of roughly the same levels of power and knowledge work together to solve problems and explore concepts.

However, I think it would be a mistake to see the differences between Piaget's and Vygotsky's ideas of Peer Learning as oppositional, or even stages in a sequential process.  A child's full cognitive and intellectual development seems to be a fluid and dynamic equilibrium between the sort of individual striving to overcome misunderstandings and disequilibriums as Piaget describes, and social collaboration between peers to develop new and novel understandings, as described by Vygotsky.

Thinking about thinking

Our reading for this week was on Information Processing, memory and cognition.  One specific topic which piqued my interest was the concept of "metacognition," or thinking about thinking.  The skills of metacognition develop along with many other cognitive abilities, although it seems that they sometimes lag behind children's more obvious cognitive skills (memory, reading, math and problem-solving, etc.).

Because I have a young boy aged 5 who has just started kindergarten, these theories of cognition and information processing are of tremendous importance in our household.  My son has taken to school very well and has progressed rapidly with his reading and math skills.  His rapid success has made him overconfident, however.  While he has quickly learned many words by sight, and how to sound out many others, he has little patience for words he doesn't know and doesn't yet have the metacognitive ability to understand the limitations of his new skills and watch out for common errors.  As a result, he often misses important concepts of a reading assignment or understands his readings in a way completely opposite of the text.  Studies of cognitive development have shown that this ability to recognize one's own weakness and possibilities for error, and to develop strategies to check one's work are vital to a child's academic progress.  My son has not been totally without progress in this regard, however.  After several mistakes and misunderstandings, he has learned to slow down and closely read questions containing words like "except," "do not," "least," "greatest," and other words that call for detailed and close reading.

Metacognition is not solely limited to academic matters, however.  Metacognitive ability and development is vital in many basic tasks of life, such as being able to understand someone else's motivations and thoughts, or in simply realizing that reality is not always what you see.

One of the most important researchers on this topic is John H. Flavell.  One of his more interesting studies looked at young children's ability to understand the possible difference between someone's physical appearance (whether they looked nice or attractive) and their moral behavior.    My first thought after reading about this study was, "how often does a pre-schooler in our modern society really need to try and discern a stranger's morality and good or evil intentions?"  Then it occurred to me that this process most likely occurs for the first time for most children while they are watching plays or movies or reading books.  In particular, it often seems that children's interest in this type of dramatic deception occurs alongside their abilities to realize that people are not always what they seem (around age 5-6).

For my own son, this particular metacognitive development has coincided with his fascination with Star Wars.  Along with all the action and special effects, a major theme of the Star Wars films is that things, and particularly people, aren't always what they seem.  An old hermit living out in the desert is really a Jedi master.  A handsome and elegant Galactic Senator is really an evil, scheming Sith Lord.  A tiny, elderly alien living alone in a swamp is really the most powerful Jedi in the universe.  And finally, a poor farm-boy living in obscurity in the middle of nowhere is really destined to save the galaxy.

The Un-trained Ear

Language acquisition was the theme of our lecture this week, and the unbounded linguistic potential of infants was an important topic.  Examining broad theories of language acquisition, we first discussed Chomsky's ideas of the "Language Acquisition Device."  What he believed to be human's innate, biologically based mental structure for the acquisition of language.  This was contrasted with Bruner's theory of the Language Acquisition Support System (LASS); the idea that language develops only in a social context, guided and supported by parents and other caregivers.

One important example introduced within this theoretical clash was Janet Werker's study of phonological perception in infants (Developmental Aspects of Cross-Language Speech Perception

Janet F. Werker, John H. V. Gilbert, Keith Humphrey and Richard C. Tees, Child Development Vol. 52, No. 1 (Mar., 1981), pp. 349-355 ).  

Werker studied infants from non-Hindi speaking families and measured their abilities to discriminate a phoneme present in Hindi but not present in English.  You can listen to the difference between these phonemes in this online Hindi lesson.  A Phoneme is the smallest unit of sound within a language that can convey meaning.  Although there are hundreds of phonemes possible, each language uses its own select and limited sample to construct its phonology.  

In both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, Werker found that infants at ages 6-8 months were able to recognize the difference between the two sounds, but that by 8-10 months, infants from non-Hindi speaking families had lost the ability to discern the Hindi phonemes.

Theoretically, this seems to support Chomsky's ideas, as we see that infants have an innate and almost unlimited ability to listen and discern differences in phonetic sounds.  As for Bruner's Social-cultural theory, in the limited case phonological discrimination, it seems that the Language Acquisition Support System is more destructive than constructive.  The child's social surroundings reinforce only the phonological productions of their native language, and the child's broad ability to discern the entire breath of human phonology withers away.

I had more than a merely academic interest in this topic, especially since Werker's study focused on Hindi.  As I have mentioned in a previous post, my wife is from India.  Although she is most comfortable speaking English, she is fluent in Hindi as well.  I know only a few words of Hindi.  As we raise our two children here in the US, we are always mindful of how to keep them in touch with their Indian heritage.  Language, of course is integral to this process.  

Our oldest child is 5, and has already passed the "sensitive period" where he could have learned to discriminate all of the sounds of Hindi.  I'm doubtful that he heard the language regularly and often enough to learn them.  He has also just begun kindergarten, and his wholehearted commitment to English phonology in concert with his efforts to learn to read make him resistant to other sounds.  Our daughter, on the other hand, is just turning 6 months old.  She is right in the middle of the sensitive period that Werker describes, where all phonological sounds are still distinct in her un-trained ear.  Unfortunately, all the pressure is on my wife to impart this ability to her.  As I never learned Hindi in my youth, I can't discriminate the sounds, nor can I re-create them accurately.     

Cross-race Identification Bias

Our lecture for this week on Perceptual Development had an interesting aside about a subject known as Cross-race Identification Bias.  This concept describes how people of a certain race often have a difficult time distinguishing between individuals of another race, and also have more difficulty recognizing the emotions of people of other races. 



This concept is an important part of perceptual development, particularly in terms of the development of the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) of the brain.  Human children are uniquely able to focus on and identify facial features from a very early age.  Development and utilization of the FFA is integral in this developmental capacity.

There is a downside to this process, however.  As with many other aspects of neurological development, our brain tends to become streamlined for simpler and faster processing.  When a baby grows up exclusively (or almost exclusively) seeing only faces of its own race, the FFA begins to specialize in recognizing the facial features and emotions of this race.  People are therefore able to more holistically identify features and emotions from people of their own race, but must rely on other more conscious (and fallible) mental processes to recognize features and emotions for people of other races.

Other social psychology studies have attributed this phenomenon to the In-group/Out-group effect, meaning that individuals view other people of the same race as members of their In-group and are more motivated to focus on and recognize their faces than people of another race, the Out-group. 

The concept of Cross-race Identification Bias is interesting as an academic subject, but it is of course also vitally important to many day-to-day aspects of life in our multi-racial, multi-cultural society.  Probably most important is its role in the criminal justice system and the reliance on eyewitness testimony.  This has often led to suspects being incorrectly identified by witness of other races and wrongly prosecuted and imprisoned.  African-Americans have been disproportionately affected by this tendency to racial bias in eyewitness reporting.

Speaking from my own experience as a Caucasian American, I can admit that this bias is definitely a problem for me.  I grew up in a very small and very racially homogenous town.  Today, living in a predominately African-American neighborhood, I have had several instances where I haven't recognized people that I had encountered several times.  On one occasion I actually passed a person on the street without recognizing them, and afterward realized that I hadn't even really looked at their face.

I have also often noticed myself being on the receiving end of this bias, however.  In my travels, I have often been mis-identified by locals of different countries, or not remembered by people I had talked to relatively recently.  I lived and studied in China for approximately a year and it was often obvious to me that for many Chinese, all white people looked alike.  I was often compared to many American celebrities that I didn't resemble in the slightest (even with different hair and eye color) simply because of the color of my skin.  Similar awkward situations often arise on travels to India to visit my wife's family.

More recently, my family lived in Tanzania for approximately 2 years, and local Tanzanian people would often confuse me with other white men.  Often times I would be approached by people who would begin talking as if they knew me and mentioning past conversations.  When I explained that I'd never met them or never been to that place, I could see the confusion on their face, gradually replaced by embarrassment. 

It wasn't always so harmless, however.  On one occasion I nearly had my car impounded because a parking enforcement officer insisted that I had sped off without paying for parking the day before and described an event in detail that I hadn't been there for.  It was obvious that she was confusing me with another Caucasian man from the same organization (with a very similar car), even though this man was 15 years older than me, balding and 6 inches shorter. 

 

I'm curious how this bias will play out for my son.  He is bi-racial (Caucasian and Asian Indian) and has been raised in areas where the majority of the population was black (Flatbush, Brooklyn and Tanzania).   Some studies have shown that increased exposure to other races can increase the accuracy of cross-race facial recognition. 

Experiment On Your Kids

Now that I have your attention with my sensationalistic title, let me tell you how I did a small (and absolutely harmless, I promise) study on my infant daughter.

Our lecture for this week was on Perceptual Development, and a special part of the lecture was devoted to explaining how psychologist has learned to study infants and their development.  As the lecture describes, early concepts of infant development saw them as passive "blank slates" who did not interact with their environment in any meaningful way.  This was because infants were mostly observed and measured on child or adult standards that relied heavily on motor coordination beyond an infant's capacities.  Psychologist eventually developed ways to study infants, however, and learned of their complex sensory lives.

One important method was to carefully observe infants and measure their eye movements or looking, along with sucking rates and heart rates.  This type of observation is then paired with studies of Habituation and Dis-habituation.  Habituation refers to that fact that when repeatedly presented with the same stimuli, infants will lose interest and pay attention to it for shorter and shorter amounts of time.  Dis-habituation occurs when the infant is then presented with a new or novel stimuli.  The infants response to the new stimuli, usually measured by how long the infant pays attention, can then be compared.  For studies of visual perception, this is usually done by observing and timing the infant's gaze on various images.

For my own little study, I used my 5 month old daughter.  I presented here with a toy she wasn't familiar with (one of her brother's toys) and watched how long she stared at it.  Here's a picture of the toy:


I thought this would be a good object to use to test for her attention because it has a face shape on it, and, as we have learned this week, infants are pre-disposed to seek out human faces.  As one would commonly predict, my daughter was very interested in the toy at first, staring for 7-8 seconds.  But after several viewings, she had little interest in it and completely stopped looking.

As you might notice from looking at the toy, however, it is a spring and can stretch out to this shape:




When I showed my daughter the stretched out shape of the toy, she immediately regained interest and stared intently for 8-9 seconds.  An interesting aspect of the toy when stretched out is that the face shape becomes distorted.  It is divided into segments and stretched out.  If stretched out long enough, the face becomes unrecognizable.  It seemed that even though my daughter initially showed great interest in the stretched out shape of the toy, she seemed to habituate to it even faster than the contracted shape.  Perhaps this fact displays a novel example of infant's preference for human faces, even over novelty in shape.  Even though the novelty of the new shape was interesting, perhaps the distortion caused in the face shape when stretched out caused her to have less overall interest.