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What a disappointing article. Maybe there's more meat to the studies cited in it, but the way they're presented here makes them seem borderline trivial, and cer
by anatoly 17y ago
What a disappointing article. Maybe there's more meat to the studies cited in it, but the way they're presented here makes them seem borderline trivial, and certainly much less interesting than claimed.
1. A baby sees a box with a lot of white balls with a few reds; then the baby is more surprised to see 4 reds with 1 white drawn out of the box than vice versa. Why does it "prove that babies could understand probabilities"? Why not suppose that the reds are more interesting to look at because they were more rare in the original set? Show a baby four identical bears and a giraffe; which toy will she later prefer to play with?
2. "In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect."
In other related and equally exciting news, MIT researchers discovered that water appears to be wet. Come on! What parent of a young child hasn't noticed that they're exploring cause and effect, every single day, all the time, at least since they learn to manipulate small objects?
And the study itself - gosh, couldn't it be simpler for a child to press one lever than two levers simultaneously, and therefore the group that didn't know what happens in that simple scenario spent more time with the toy?
3. "These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine."
But if the children learned the effect of each block from the first time they observed it in action, completely ignoring subsequent times and therefore unable to use any probabilistic reasoning, you would still expect the same effect to happen on average in a group of children. In other words, this setup doesn't even prove that the children can distinguish a mostly working block from a mostly non-working one (doesn't sound as exciting as "high-probability", does it?).
Given the way all these experiments are described, it also seems doubtful that the sample sizes were adequate, that there was a control group, that they were double-blind.
Basically all this seems like a bunch of wishful thinking, and a set of sloppy experiments drawn up to reach a foregone conclusion.
- robg 17y agoThese seem like all good questions, but an op-ed in the NY Times isn't the place to address them. There just isn't room to specify all of the tested variables and their controls and how the results support the conclusions. Of course the NY Times should be linking to the original research reports. Still, I don't know how this op-ed could lead someone to think the research was sloppy. For me to say that I'd have to, after I read the original reports, present alternative designs that eliminated confounding variables but that didn't introduce additional ones. Here are the papers: 1. http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~fei/XuGarcia-PNAS.pdf http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~fei/XuGarcia-PNAS.pdf 2. http://web.mit.edu/eccl/papers/bonawitzandschulzseriousfun.pdf http://web.mit.edu/eccl/papers/bonawitzandschulzseriousfun.p... 3. http://www.alisongopnik.com/Papers/Kushnir%20DevPsych.pdf http://www.alisongopnik.com/Papers/Kushnir%20DevPsych.pdf I'm sure the researchers would be pleased to answer any questions.
- anatoly 17y agoThank you for tracking down the papers.
- ahoyhere 17y agoMaybe this aren't good examples but great ones are out there. For example, even the littlest babies understand basic physics. Once they're old enough to focus, if you show them a video of a ball hitting a stack of blocks adn the blocks go flying, they don't care. But if you show even a few milliseconds' delay between the ball strike and the blocks flying, they get very, very interested indeed. By the way, the studies no doubt have controls and reasons for the way that they determine the probability that babies are paying attention to red balls because of x than because of y. These types of studies have a long history in the field. But the op-ed author is not going to go into those details.
- pbhj 17y ago"The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced." I'd warrant most people know that babies respond first to the contrast of black and white and next to bright red - if the experiment worked equally with other colours then just about any other colour combination would be more notable. I do wonder if this is unique to light-pink skinned babies/parents as I suspect the reaction to red helps in locating the mothers nipple, though I'm not set on that hypothesis. "When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest." I disagree there too, preschoolers can focus intently on something they are interested in despite all effort to divert that attention. I suspect they don't have the ability to context switch nor really multi-task and so instead of momentarily diverting attention (multi-tasking) pending a context switch they attempt to complete the current process before interrupting. "Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play." What does "just allowing them to play" even mean. No toys? That's providing things, not "just". No scenery? That's providing a context. No interaction? I don't think kids really learn by just playing, they have to have experiences to play out, inspiration of their imagination, people to interact with and yes even things. The old favourite of playing with cardboard boxes is providing things (boxes) and relies on the child having been stimulated to have the experience of things to imagine the box as.