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I think they should have done this with an incentive. Basically, don't ask "If I want to make the music box play, which figurine should I use?" But tell the chi

I think they should have done this with an incentive. Basically, don't ask "If I want to make the music box play, which figurine should I use?" But tell the children before the sorting task that if they make the music box play you'll give them a marshmallow. Without an incentive the kids may just not care enough to investigate.

Yajirobe 5y ago
Better yet, threaten to punish them. It's been shown that negative reinforcement is more effective than positive
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  It's wrong to threaten to punish a child just for the fun of it, even if "fun" is cloaked in a scientific study.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Nobody said anything about fun. Punishment can be done easily and ethically in child studies. It can be as simple as starting them with a marshmallow and telling them you will take it away if they are wrong.
    - watwut 5y ago
      1. Sweets and food should not be used as reward and punishnent in the first place. So that not eating them is not emotionally punishment, but just healthy thing to do. 2. Cue meltdown in many kids with that tactic - you bring up ecpectation and then crash it. 3. Have you people even interacted with kid? What it is with adults who seek to design punishment into situation where there is already compliance or which is about unimportant bs?
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Im not sure if we are taking about the same topic, but in case you are >1. Sweets and food should not be used as reward and punishnent in the first place. So that not eating them is not emotionally punishment, but just healthy thing to do. Kids like treats, have you met one? >2. Cue meltdown in many kids with that tactic - you bring up ecpectation and then crash it. Preschoolers can understand conditional rewards and penalties and play simple games. We arent talking about toddlers here. >3. Have you people even interacted with kid? What it is with adults who seek to design punishment into situation where there is already compliance or which is about unimportant bs? Not sure what you on about here. What situation and what compliance are your referring to? We are taking about the design of a human behavior study, not how people should raise their kids.
        watwut 5y ago
        > Kids like treats, have you met one? My comment was about what you attitude you teach them about sweets. Nothing in it implied they dont like it. They still should not be used as reward. Not having sweets is not punishment. It is just healthy behavior. You dont eat sweets as reward for being good either. Being good dont imply ability to eat more sweets. > Preschoolers can understand conditional rewards and penalties and play simple games Preschoolers have meltdowns over those super regularly. They actually completely sux at games with rules over rewards and punishments, because they sux at hangling the disappointment. Have you worked with preschoolers, ever? > Not sure what you on about here. What situation and what compliance are your referring to? We are taking about the design of a human behavior study, not how people should raise their kids. The kids did as scientists asked them. That is compliance - there was no issue of kids ignoring doll or going to play chase.
        s1artibartfast 5y ago
        >The kids did as scientists asked them. That is compliance - there was no issue of kids ignoring doll or going to play chase This will be my last response because you clearly don't understand the OP study or the discussion in this thread. The study looked at a problem solving task with conflicting instructions, and measured the ability of children to complete the task correctly. acituan and ALittleLight raised valid points that rewards and punishment could change the study results. For example, maybe children would be complete the task better better if they were punished or rewarded if they complete the study wrong for right. My point is that while it would be unethical to beat or harm a child for completing the task wrong, there are ethical ways to include some other forms of punishment. It seems like you have some pet social and behavioral issues, but I find your poor grammar and communication skills trying, and have no interest in discussing them further.
- ascar 5y ago
  Common mistake: Negative reinforcement is when you take a negative stimulus away to reinforce the desired behavior. What you're describing is positive punishment. Also nicely explained in TBBT: https://youtu.be/gLp_aLMm5qQ https://youtu.be/gLp_aLMm5qQ
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    well it shouldn't. makes much more sense to use negative reinforcement as a term to describe a reinforcing stimulus of a negative nature. optimal terminology has never been our strong point as a scientific community.
    - machinerychorus 5y ago
      makes more sense at first glance maybe, but when you dig into it more it's perfectly logical. "positive" refers to adding stimulus, "negative" refers to removing stimulus. "Reinforcement" is anything that increases the occurrence of the behavior, "punishment" is anything that decreases the occurrence of the behavior.
      - renewiltord 5y ago
        Perhaps we should have used “stimulating” and “depriving”. This reminds me of the whole Type One and Type Two error thing.
        lupire 5y ago
        "additive" and "subtractive"
    - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
      That doesn’t make sense at all. That interpretation would make “positive reinforcement” and “negative punishment” redundant, and it would make “positive punishment” and “negative reinforcement” contradictory. It’s very difficult to effectively reason about modes of operant conditioning when you throw that much nuance out of the window.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Source?
yorwba 5y ago
I think making the music box play is supposed to be rewarding in itself.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  But 60-70% of the kids didn't even use the music box when they could have. Not a great reward.
acituan 5y ago
Exactly this. The concluding claim from the paper; > Thus, this study is consistent with the proposal that the majority of preschool children do not seize opportunities to engage in structured empirical investigations with the explicit purpose of resolving conflicts that arise from surprising testimony completely ignores the bioeconomics of carrying out “structural empirical investigations”. It is more expensive to carrying out investigations than to take a best guess. In the presence of tons of other cognitive tasks they could be doing, they have no obvious reason to carry out this particular and ostensibly boring investigation. Knowing the natural curiosity of kids, they have a high baseline of investigative behavior.
adrusi 5y ago
I was thinking this at first too, because if there's no reinforcement or punishment, then the instructions to sort the figurines based on whether or not they will activate the music box is ambiguous — should you sort them such that other people will think they're sorted correctly or so that they actually are? But now I'm less sure. The adult giving the instructions to sort the figurines is the one who was presented as not knowing how the music box worked. They were the only adult in the room and remained in the room while the child performed the task, which would suggest to the child that they would be the one evaluating them. Since the person evaluating the child's performance was not the one giving the misleading testimony the two possible interpretations of the goal of the task shouldn't give conflicting behavioral prescriptions.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Yeah, I think the design of the experiment is good to catch this potential weakness. If it was the knowledgeable experimenter instructing the children, that could really confuse things. I think it's still potentially a source of confusion, but less of one. If you imagine that instead of sorting 4 figurines they had to sort 400, then it would be easy to see that the kids aren't going to test all of them. Too boring. They may not even go to the trouble of testing a sample of the figurines. The would need some incentive to drive them to do a bit more work than the bare minimum. If I ask my son to clean his room, and I return to discover he's done a poor job, I will not think that he doesn't understand how to clean his room. Similarly, if these kids are asked to sort figurines and they just go by what they're told (or what they observed) without testing, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't understand that testing might be useful.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Yajirobe 5y ago

Better yet, threaten to punish them. It's been shown that negative reinforcement is more effective than positive

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ARandomerDude 5y ago
It's wrong to threaten to punish a child just for the fun of it, even if "fun" is cloaked in a scientific study.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Nobody said anything about fun. Punishment can be done easily and ethically in child studies. It can be as simple as starting them with a marshmallow and telling them you will take it away if they are wrong.
  - watwut 5y ago
    1. Sweets and food should not be used as reward and punishnent in the first place. So that not eating them is not emotionally punishment, but just healthy thing to do. 2. Cue meltdown in many kids with that tactic - you bring up ecpectation and then crash it. 3. Have you people even interacted with kid? What it is with adults who seek to design punishment into situation where there is already compliance or which is about unimportant bs?
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Im not sure if we are taking about the same topic, but in case you are >1. Sweets and food should not be used as reward and punishnent in the first place. So that not eating them is not emotionally punishment, but just healthy thing to do. Kids like treats, have you met one? >2. Cue meltdown in many kids with that tactic - you bring up ecpectation and then crash it. Preschoolers can understand conditional rewards and penalties and play simple games. We arent talking about toddlers here. >3. Have you people even interacted with kid? What it is with adults who seek to design punishment into situation where there is already compliance or which is about unimportant bs? Not sure what you on about here. What situation and what compliance are your referring to? We are taking about the design of a human behavior study, not how people should raise their kids.
      - watwut 5y ago
        > Kids like treats, have you met one? My comment was about what you attitude you teach them about sweets. Nothing in it implied they dont like it. They still should not be used as reward. Not having sweets is not punishment. It is just healthy behavior. You dont eat sweets as reward for being good either. Being good dont imply ability to eat more sweets. > Preschoolers can understand conditional rewards and penalties and play simple games Preschoolers have meltdowns over those super regularly. They actually completely sux at games with rules over rewards and punishments, because they sux at hangling the disappointment. Have you worked with preschoolers, ever? > Not sure what you on about here. What situation and what compliance are your referring to? We are taking about the design of a human behavior study, not how people should raise their kids. The kids did as scientists asked them. That is compliance - there was no issue of kids ignoring doll or going to play chase.
        s1artibartfast 5y ago
        >The kids did as scientists asked them. That is compliance - there was no issue of kids ignoring doll or going to play chase This will be my last response because you clearly don't understand the OP study or the discussion in this thread. The study looked at a problem solving task with conflicting instructions, and measured the ability of children to complete the task correctly. acituan and ALittleLight raised valid points that rewards and punishment could change the study results. For example, maybe children would be complete the task better better if they were punished or rewarded if they complete the study wrong for right. My point is that while it would be unethical to beat or harm a child for completing the task wrong, there are ethical ways to include some other forms of punishment. It seems like you have some pet social and behavioral issues, but I find your poor grammar and communication skills trying, and have no interest in discussing them further.
ascar 5y ago
Common mistake: Negative reinforcement is when you take a negative stimulus away to reinforce the desired behavior. What you're describing is positive punishment. Also nicely explained in TBBT: https://youtu.be/gLp_aLMm5qQ https://youtu.be/gLp_aLMm5qQ
- tpoacher 5y ago
  well it shouldn't. makes much more sense to use negative reinforcement as a term to describe a reinforcing stimulus of a negative nature. optimal terminology has never been our strong point as a scientific community.
  - machinerychorus 5y ago
    makes more sense at first glance maybe, but when you dig into it more it's perfectly logical. "positive" refers to adding stimulus, "negative" refers to removing stimulus. "Reinforcement" is anything that increases the occurrence of the behavior, "punishment" is anything that decreases the occurrence of the behavior.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      Perhaps we should have used “stimulating” and “depriving”. This reminds me of the whole Type One and Type Two error thing.
      - lupire 5y ago
        "additive" and "subtractive"
  - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    That doesn’t make sense at all. That interpretation would make “positive reinforcement” and “negative punishment” redundant, and it would make “positive punishment” and “negative reinforcement” contradictory. It’s very difficult to effectively reason about modes of operant conditioning when you throw that much nuance out of the window.
elliekelly 5y ago
Source?

yorwba 5y ago

I think making the music box play is supposed to be rewarding in itself.

ALittleLight 5y ago
But 60-70% of the kids didn't even use the music box when they could have. Not a great reward.

acituan 5y ago

Exactly this. The concluding claim from the paper; > Thus, this study is consistent with the proposal that the majority of preschool children do not seize opportunities to engage in structured empirical investigations with the explicit purpose of resolving conflicts that arise from surprising testimony completely ignores the bioeconomics of carrying out “structural empirical investigations”. It is more expensive to carrying out investigations than to take a best guess. In the presence of tons of other cognitive tasks they could be doing, they have no obvious reason to carry out this particular and ostensibly boring investigation. Knowing the natural curiosity of kids, they have a high baseline of investigative behavior.

adrusi 5y ago

I was thinking this at first too, because if there's no reinforcement or punishment, then the instructions to sort the figurines based on whether or not they will activate the music box is ambiguous — should you sort them such that other people will think they're sorted correctly or so that they actually are? But now I'm less sure. The adult giving the instructions to sort the figurines is the one who was presented as not knowing how the music box worked. They were the only adult in the room and remained in the room while the child performed the task, which would suggest to the child that they would be the one evaluating them. Since the person evaluating the child's performance was not the one giving the misleading testimony the two possible interpretations of the goal of the task shouldn't give conflicting behavioral prescriptions.

ALittleLight 5y ago
Yeah, I think the design of the experiment is good to catch this potential weakness. If it was the knowledgeable experimenter instructing the children, that could really confuse things. I think it's still potentially a source of confusion, but less of one. If you imagine that instead of sorting 4 figurines they had to sort 400, then it would be easy to see that the kids aren't going to test all of them. Too boring. They may not even go to the trouble of testing a sample of the figurines. The would need some incentive to drive them to do a bit more work than the bare minimum. If I ask my son to clean his room, and I return to discover he's done a poor job, I will not think that he doesn't understand how to clean his room. Similarly, if these kids are asked to sort figurines and they just go by what they're told (or what they observed) without testing, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't understand that testing might be useful.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]