1,720,980 research outputs found
Puppet minds
No full textThis paper culminates the PSY 2990 Honors Research Seminar, which lasted a total of 4 semesters. The author worked under the mentorship of Georgene Troseth, a professor in the Peabody Department of Psychology and Human Development. The paper describes research exploring whether 4-year-old children think a puppet has a mind separate from that of the puppeteer. The results illuminate preschoolers' understanding of puppets and how a puppet’s prior behavior may influence children’s beliefs about a puppeteer.This study assessed whether 4-year-old children think a puppet has a mind separate from that of the puppeteer. 64 children, 48-60 months, watched a puppet (operated by a visible person) and another person label 3 familiar objects. One person consistently labeled correctly and the other, incorrectly. Across children, we counterbalanced which of the labelers operated the puppet and whether the puppet was correct or incorrect. In the experimental (but not the control) group, the puppet then was passed to the other person (e.g., from the mis-labeler to the correct labeler, or vice versa). Then the puppeteer/puppet and the other person labeled a novel object with two different novel names. We asked children for the name of the novel object, examining whether the children used the puppet's or the person's label. We also asked follow-up questions to probe children's reasoning. The results illuminate preschoolers' understanding of puppets and how a puppet’s prior behavior may influence children’s beliefs about a puppeteer.Thesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Honors Program in Psychological SciencesVanderbilt UniversityPsychological Science
A New Way to Co-Play with Media: Evaluating the Role of Instructional Prompts on Parent-Child Interaction Quality during Digital Application Usage
No full textParent-child interaction plays a critical role in the outcomes that emerge from a given shared activity. However, there are clear context effects on the kinds of behaviors that determine a high-quality interaction between parents and children. For example, rich conversation may be more central to shared book reading than during joint toy play. One newer context that may benefit from high-quality interactions is joint media engagement (JME), or when two individuals share an interaction around digital content. Yet parents often view digital media-based activities as primarily solo interactions for the child, rather than opportunities for cooperation and reciprocity. There is little research on how to promote high-quality parent-child interactions in contexts that involve digital media, such as co-play of a digital game application. The current study evaluated whether the incorporation of parent-based information slides, or nudges, would promote significant changes in parent-child interaction behaviors. We also hypothesized the existence of a latent variable, interaction quality, that underlay measurements of conversation, engagement, and behavior. Four-year-old children and their parent (n = 77) in the United States participated in a pre-test Zoom session during which they played two pre-selected activities in a co-play game application (OK Play), and then were randomly assigned to use a version of the same application 10 times over two weeks that either did or did not contain parent-directed nudges before every activity. Upon completion, parents and children were brought in for a post-test Zoom session to evaluate whether condition differences and within-condition growth emerged. Given the small sample size, a Bayesian structural equation model was chosen for the analyses, and measures of conversation, engagement, and behavior were used as indicators for the latent variable. Results showed that, despite the model fitting the data (ppp = .326) and the latent variable being detected, the nudge intervention had no effect on parent-child interaction quality. Future research should consider digital media that contains parent-based features that are less frequent yet harder to ignore, as this may have a more robust effect on parent-child interaction quality
The Role of Symbolic Experience in Learning to use Scale Models
No full textChildren begin to use symbolic objects and symbol systems in the preschool period. Experience interpreting and using a relatively simple symbolic artifact can lead young children to become sensitive to a more difficult symbolic relation, or to transfer their symbolic insight (DeLoache, 1995a). The majority of studies exploring transfer of symbolic comprehension have done so using the same “object retrieval” problem-solving task for the training and the transfer tasks (Troseth et al., 2019). It is unclear if prior symbolic experience presented in a different task context can help young children understand a more difficult symbolic relation when the task changes. The present research examined if giving 2.5-year-olds symbolic experience with objects in the context of a simple communication task could support their success with a scale model in the object-retrieval task. Study 1 involved pilot testing training tasks based on procedures of Tomasello et al. (1999) to help children comprehend simple symbolic relations. Participants struggled to use objects (e.g., replicas, pretend transformations) as symbols for other objects, requiring extensive support to do so. Study 2 explores the effect of two version of the training task on search performance in the scale model object-retrieval task. The training tasks were designed to build up young children’s symbolic sensitivity to new symbolic relations by giving them experience interpreting a variety of symbol-referent relations. However, children in both training conditions of Study 2 struggled to use the hiding event in the model to infer the location of the full-sized toy in the adjacent room. Presumably, the change in context between the training (communication) and object retrieval task made it difficult for children to transfer learning. These results suggest that sensitivity to new symbolic relations may develop slowly in very young children because they require extensive support in order to make sense of novel symbolic relations
The Effects of a Laugh Track on Viewing Verbal Bullying in Television
No full textvii, 39 p.Ninety-three percent of adolescent television shows contain acts of aggression. It is thought that viewing aggressive media has the potential to increase aggressive thoughts and behaviors. The current study examined how the use of a laugh track acting as a reinforcer changed participants' attitudes toward a bully situation. In Experiments 1A and IB a total of 177 female participants watched and rated either 12 TV clips containing a laugh track or 12 YouTube clips containing no laugh track. Participants were then asked to watch a clip featuring a bullying scenario and indicate when they would intervene. It was hypothesized that the presence of a laugh track would encourage participants to rate TV clips as being funnier, less mean, and more self and peer acceptable than participants who viewed YouTube clips, and that participants in the TV condition would be more tolerant of bullying, as indicated by a longer intervention time. All hypotheses were supported except for both TV and YouTube were rated as equally mean, and participants in the TV condition of Experiment 1Bwere not more tolerant. Although there was no significant difference between the perceived meanness of TV and YouTube clips, all participants rated the clips as being more mean than funny. Also, in spite of TV clips being perceived as significantly funnier than YouTube clips, the TV clips were not rated high enough on a 4-point scale to be considered funny. In Experiment 2 a total of 76 female participants read and rated transcripts of the same clips in Experiments 1A and IB. It was hypothesized that funniness, meanness, self acceptability, and peer acceptability would be rated equally. All hypotheses in Experiment 2 were supported meaning that all participants perceived the written transcripts to be equally funny, equally mean, and equally self and peer acceptable
Can 24-Month-Old Toddlers Transfer Their Representational Insights from Video to Pictures?
No full textThis is an honor thesis for PSY-PC-4999-01 with Georgene Troseth as my faculty advisor.Representational media are everywhere in children’s daily lives: the photos on the wall, the videos shown on TV, and the picture books children read. In order to foster better learning and develop more age-appropriate interactive media for children, prior researchers have explored young children’s ability to understand these representational media, including photos and videos. In the current study, 24-month-olds’ ability to utilize and apply information from video and pictures to solve tasks in the real world was tested. Replicating two of the conditions in Troseth, Saylor, and Archer (2006)’s study, the current study investigated if a five-minute interactive, contingent video experience could facilitate children’s use of information from video to solve an object retrieval task, compared to a controlled group. As a transfer task, children participated in an object retrieval task using photos on the following day. This task explored whether experience with contingent video (video chat) would promote children’s understanding of representations more generally. A significant positive correlation was found between children’s performance on the first day and the second day, and children's language skill also displayed a significant positive correlation with children's performance. However, children in the interactive video condition in the current study did not perform as well as in the Troseth et al. (2006) study. With the support from a follow-up CCTV condition (with a full-sized video screen), it was conjectured that the children's lower performance in the video condition resulted from a lack of parental support while co-viewing the video chat with their child.Thesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Honors Program in Psychological Science
A Closer Look at Enhanced Ebooks: Compatible Versus Distracting Games
No full textCompleted for Dr. Megan Saylor's PSY-PC 2990 "Honors Research" class, this thesis investigates different types of games embedded in children's interactive eBooks and how the quality of these games (i.e., how much the games relate to and enhance the story content) affects how much a kindergarten child can learn from the story. Word document is accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation.The current literature on eBooks contains conflicting results for enhanced eBooks containing games and hot spots as effective reading tools for children. This study investigated different types of interactivity within enhanced eBooks to understand how the relation of the games embedded in eBooks to the story line may affect how much the child learns from the story. The study also involved observation of the different co-reading styles of parents and children as an exploratory analysis. The results indicate that interactivity within the enhanced eBooks neither helped nor hurt children’s ability to learn new words from the story and to remember the story content. It was also found that all of the eBooks elicited content-related co-reading, but enhanced eBooks elicited more non-content-related co-reading. Implications of the findings are discussed.Thesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Honors Program in Psychological Sciences Under the supervision of Georgene TrosethPeabody CollegeVanderbilt UniversityPsychology and Human Developmen
In Modeling Digital Learning, Remember Pictorial Competence
Full text linkBarr and Kirkorian (2023) summarize decades of research about young children’s learning and transfer from screen media, offer a new theoretical model of factors involved in early multimedia learning, and suggest a future research agenda to study learning from commercial media products “in the wild” of everyday family life outside the lab. In this commentary, the authors offer background on the development of symbolic understanding and “pictorial competence” for young children’s learning from screen media and attempt to deepen the discussion of cognitive factors and individual differences that affect early learning
TV Guide: Learning to Use Video as a Source of Information
No full text68 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.To gain information from a symbol, one must recognize the relation between the symbol and what it stands for. Although the relation between a live video image and a real, current event seems obvious to adults, this is not true of very young children: In a series of previous studies, 2-year-olds did not reliably use a video view of a hiding event to find a hidden object. Children's experience with television (which typically is not related to present reality) may predispose them to overlook relevant information presented by this medium. In the research reported here, the effect of experience on children's use of information from video was examined. In Experiments 1 and 2, 2-year-old children were exposed to live video at home over the course of two weeks. They were subsequently able to use video to solve an object-retrieval task in the lab. After gaining experience with live video, the children also successfully used information from a different symbolic medium, pictures, to solve a similar problem. This is the first evidence of transfer from one symbolic medium to another by this age group. The limits of transfer from live video experience were explored in Experiments 3A and 3B. In Experiment 4, two potentially helpful factors present in live video were examined. When contingency and auditory cues were added to 2-year-olds' experience with live video in the lab, they succeeded at the video object-retrieval task and a later picture transfer task. Thus, giving 2-year-olds relevant experience with video helped them detect the relation between video and reality. Age differences in young children's use of video suggest that symbolic experience and cognitive flexibility are involved in symbolic development.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD
Supporting toddlers’ transfer of word learning from video
Full text linkYoung children frequently do not transfer information from video to real-world situations. We provided perceptual and conceptual supports to help children transfer a new word from video to physical objects and photos. An on-screen actress labeled one of two novel objects; then 24-month-olds were asked to identify the ‘modi.’ Children failed to demonstrate word learning after holding the objects while viewing (comparison condition). In a two-step transfer condition, children correctly identified the modi on a test video image but did not identify the real matching object. However, when parents pointed out that the real objects were “the same” as those on screen (scaffold condition), children demonstrated reliable transfer of the word from video to reality. This study shows that parents’ active co-viewing of videos supports transfer and suggests that toddlers’ frequent failure to learn from video stems at least partially from their lack of understanding of the relevance of video to real life
TV Guide: Learning to Use Video as a Source of Information
No full textTo gain information from a symbol, one must recognize the relation between the symbol and what it stands for. Although the relation between a live video image and a real, current event seems obvious to adults, this is not true of very young children: In a series of previous studies, 2-year-olds did not reliably use a video view of a hiding event to find a hidden object. Children's experience with television (which typically is not related to present reality) may predispose them to overlook relevant information presented by this medium. In the research reported here, the effect of experience on children's use of information from video was examined. In Experiments 1 and 2, 2-year-old children were exposed to live video at home over the course of two weeks. They were subsequently able to use video to solve an object-retrieval task in the lab. After gaining experience with live video, the children also successfully used information from a different symbolic medium, pictures, to solve a similar problem. This is the first evidence of transfer from one symbolic medium to another by this age group. The limits of transfer from live video experience were explored in Experiments 3A and 3B. In Experiment 4, two potentially helpful factors present in live video were examined. When contingency and auditory cues were added to 2-year-olds' experience with live video in the lab, they succeeded at the video object-retrieval task and a later picture transfer task. Thus, giving 2-year-olds relevant experience with video helped them detect the relation between video and reality. Age differences in young children's use of video suggest that symbolic experience and cognitive flexibility are involved in symbolic development.Made available in DSpace on 2015-09-25T20:40:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2
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Previous issue date: 2000Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 83608
Lift date: Forever
Reason: Restricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDsRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDsU of I Only68 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000
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