Neuroscience

Articles and news from the latest research reports.

Posts tagged preschoolers

160 notes

Preschoolers Can Reflect on What They Don’t Know

Contrary to previous assumptions, researchers find that preschoolers are able to gauge the strength of their memories and make decisions based on their self-assessments. The study findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

image

“Previously, developmental researchers assumed that preschoolers did not introspect much on their mental states, and were not able to reflect on their own uncertainty when problem solving,” says psychological scientist Emily Hembacher of the University of California, Davis, lead author of the study. “This is partly because young children are not usually able to tell us much about their own mental processes due to verbal limitations.”

In several previous studies in their lab, Hembacher and co-author Simona Ghetti observed that preschoolers reported feeling uncertain after giving wrong answers during tasks, suggesting the preschoolers were capable of metacognition — the ability to evaluate one’s own thoughts and mental states.

The researchers decided to examine preschoolers’ metacognition about their memories, given its importance for learning.  They investigated whether kids could assess their confidence in their memories and use those assessments in deciding whether to exclude answers they had generated but were unsure of when given the option.

Eighty-one children ages 3, 4, and 5 participated in the study.  The preschoolers viewed a series of drawings of various items, such as a piano or a balloon.  Half of the images were presented once, and the other half were shown twice.  Next, the children were presented with a pair of images: one they had seen, and a new one they had not seen.  The children were instructed to pick which image they’d seen before in the previous task.

After making their choice, the preschoolers rated how confident they were that their choice was correct.  They then sorted their answers into two boxes.  One box was for the responses that children were confident about and wanted researchers to evaluate for a prize.  The other one was for responses the children thought might be mistaken and that they didn’t want researchers to see.

The data revealed that only 4- and 5-year-olds reported being less confident in their incorrect than their correct memory responses.  They were also more confident about images they’d seen twice, suggesting that they could distinguish between stronger and weaker memories. Older preschoolers were also more likely to decide whether they wanted researchers to see their answers based on their confidence level.

Although 3-year-olds didn’t display the same kind of metacognitive capability on individual responses, the data showed that 3-year-olds who had scored well reported higher confidence overall than kids who hadn’t scored as well.

When the researchers analyzed just the correct answers, they found that preschoolers of all ages sorted responses they weren’t as confident about to the box they didn’t want researchers to evaluate.  So, while they may not be as advanced as their older peers, even children as young as 3 seem to display some ability to reflect on their own knowledge.

The findings contribute to research on the reliability of children’s eyewitness testimony in a court of law, and they carry important implications for educational practices.

“Previous emphasis on the development of metacognition during middle childhood has influenced education practices aimed at strengthening children’s monitoring and control of their own learning,” says Hembacher. “Now we know that some of these ideas may be adapted to meet preschoolers’ learning needs.”

(Source: psychologicalscience.org)

Filed under learning memory child development confidence preschoolers psychology neuroscience

137 notes

With Parents’ Help, Preschoolers Can Learn to Pay Attention Pay attention! Whether it’s listening to a teacher giving instructions or completing a word problem, the ability to tune out distractions and focus on a task is key to academic success. Now, a new study suggests that a brief training program in attention for 3- to 5-year-olds and their families could help boost brain activity and narrow the academic achievement gap between low- and high-income students. Children from families of low socioeconomic status generally score lower than more affluent kids on standardized tests of intelligence, language, spatial reasoning, and math, says Priti Shah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study. “That’s just a plain fact.” A more controversial question that scientists and politicians have batted around for decades, says Shah, is “What is the source of that difference?” Part of it may be genetic, but environmental factors, ranging from prenatal nutrition to exposure to toxic substances like lead, may also account for the early childhood differences in cognitive ability that appear by age 3 or 4. So far, however, “there aren’t that many randomized, controlled trials that show that the environment has an impact on a child’s abilities,” Shah says. The new study does just that. It focuses on the ability to hone in on a task and ignore distractions, which “leverages every single thing we do,” says cognitive neuroscientist Helen Neville at the University of Oregon, Eugene. For more than 30 years, Neville and her colleagues have been studying the neural bases of this ability, called selective attention. A classic example of selective attention is the "cocktail party" problem, where we must ignore other voices while listening to one person’s story. When an adult does that, “you get a little blip” in their brain activity, she says—a microvolt of electricity lasting a 10th of a second that can be picked up with EEG electrodes on the scalp. Children of higher socioeconomic status show a similar brain response to adults, whereas children from lower-income families generally show a much reduced response or none at all, Neville says. Programs designed to improve cognitive skills such as selective attention are often costly and time-intensive, and don’t address how a child’s caretakers and home environment can reinforce those skills, Neville says. To determine whether a short, relatively inexpensive family-based training program could generate improvements, Neville and colleagues recruited 141 3- to 5-year olds in Oregon who were in Head Start—a preschool program for children whose families live at or below the poverty line —and randomly divided them into three groups. For 8 weeks, children in the first group spent about an hour every week playing games and doing activities that require focused attention. Some tasks were simple, like coloring inside the lines, while others were more complex. In one game, for example, children were asked to deliver a small dish of water to a frog, walking only along a narrow ribbon, says Eric Pakulak, a study co-author. Other children might play in the periphery with balloons to ramp up the challenge, he says. In addition, “We also talk about what it means to be paying attention, and how to notice that you’re distracted.” While the students played, parents or caregivers took 2-hour-long weekly classes on parenting that included general strategies for reducing family stress, such as creating consistent home routines, as well as activities specifically directed at boosting attention similar to those used in class that they could play with their children—one activity, for example, was to match words such as “happy” or “sad” to pictures of different facial expressions. In the second group, students performed the attention-boosting activities as well, but parents received only three 90-minute sessions of instruction and did not have an opportunity to learn the curriculum in depth; in the third group, neither kids nor their parents did anything special. After 8 weeks, the team applied a battery of standard assessments, such as IQ and spatial reasoning tests and behavioral reports from teachers and parents; they also measured changes in brain activity while students listened to two recorded stories simultaneously. Instructed to attend to only one of two competing stories—”The Blue Kangaroo” vs. “Harry the Dog,” for example—the children whose parents had received additional attention instruction showed a 50 percent increase in brain activity in response to the correct story compared to children in the other two groups, the authors report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; their responses matched those seen in adults and children of higher socioeconomic status. In addition, the children on average showed a roughly 7-point IQ increase, and teachers and parents reported significant improvements in academic performance and behavior. No such differences were evident in the two controls, Neville says, suggesting that parental involvement was key. Many existing programs try to help young children of low socioeconomic status develop the skills needed to thrive in school, but “almost all happen without any scientifically designed pre-vs. post-behavioral or neural measures,” says Rajeev Raizada, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York. This study is one of the first to combine such tests with an intervention, he says. Such interventions “are of great interest scientifically, because they are about as close as you can get to experimental research on the effects of child poverty on the brain,” says Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Raizada cautions that the parental training program was broad, making it hard to know which aspects were really crucial, he says. “Another crucial question is how long-lasting will the kids’ gains be?” he adds. “A common feature of intervention programs is that they tend to produce some immediate gains, but those gains often tend to fade out over subsequent months.” Before implementing programs based on the new study, Farah says, “we need to invest in replication, fine-tuning, and all the hard work of bringing a program to scale.” Still, given striking improvements seen in just 8 weekly sessions, “I think that we need to regard these results as wonderful news,” she says.

With Parents’ Help, Preschoolers Can Learn to Pay Attention

Pay attention! Whether it’s listening to a teacher giving instructions or completing a word problem, the ability to tune out distractions and focus on a task is key to academic success. Now, a new study suggests that a brief training program in attention for 3- to 5-year-olds and their families could help boost brain activity and narrow the academic achievement gap between low- and high-income students.

Children from families of low socioeconomic status generally score lower than more affluent kids on standardized tests of intelligence, language, spatial reasoning, and math, says Priti Shah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study. “That’s just a plain fact.” A more controversial question that scientists and politicians have batted around for decades, says Shah, is “What is the source of that difference?” Part of it may be genetic, but environmental factors, ranging from prenatal nutrition to exposure to toxic substances like lead, may also account for the early childhood differences in cognitive ability that appear by age 3 or 4. So far, however, “there aren’t that many randomized, controlled trials that show that the environment has an impact on a child’s abilities,” Shah says.

The new study does just that. It focuses on the ability to hone in on a task and ignore distractions, which “leverages every single thing we do,” says cognitive neuroscientist Helen Neville at the University of Oregon, Eugene. For more than 30 years, Neville and her colleagues have been studying the neural bases of this ability, called selective attention.

A classic example of selective attention is the "cocktail party" problem, where we must ignore other voices while listening to one person’s story. When an adult does that, “you get a little blip” in their brain activity, she says—a microvolt of electricity lasting a 10th of a second that can be picked up with EEG electrodes on the scalp. Children of higher socioeconomic status show a similar brain response to adults, whereas children from lower-income families generally show a much reduced response or none at all, Neville says.

Programs designed to improve cognitive skills such as selective attention are often costly and time-intensive, and don’t address how a child’s caretakers and home environment can reinforce those skills, Neville says. To determine whether a short, relatively inexpensive family-based training program could generate improvements, Neville and colleagues recruited 141 3- to 5-year olds in Oregon who were in Head Start—a preschool program for children whose families live at or below the poverty line —and randomly divided them into three groups.

For 8 weeks, children in the first group spent about an hour every week playing games and doing activities that require focused attention. Some tasks were simple, like coloring inside the lines, while others were more complex. In one game, for example, children were asked to deliver a small dish of water to a frog, walking only along a narrow ribbon, says Eric Pakulak, a study co-author. Other children might play in the periphery with balloons to ramp up the challenge, he says. In addition, “We also talk about what it means to be paying attention, and how to notice that you’re distracted.”

While the students played, parents or caregivers took 2-hour-long weekly classes on parenting that included general strategies for reducing family stress, such as creating consistent home routines, as well as activities specifically directed at boosting attention similar to those used in class that they could play with their children—one activity, for example, was to match words such as “happy” or “sad” to pictures of different facial expressions. In the second group, students performed the attention-boosting activities as well, but parents received only three 90-minute sessions of instruction and did not have an opportunity to learn the curriculum in depth; in the third group, neither kids nor their parents did anything special.

After 8 weeks, the team applied a battery of standard assessments, such as IQ and spatial reasoning tests and behavioral reports from teachers and parents; they also measured changes in brain activity while students listened to two recorded stories simultaneously. Instructed to attend to only one of two competing stories—”The Blue Kangaroo” vs. “Harry the Dog,” for example—the children whose parents had received additional attention instruction showed a 50 percent increase in brain activity in response to the correct story compared to children in the other two groups, the authors report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; their responses matched those seen in adults and children of higher socioeconomic status. In addition, the children on average showed a roughly 7-point IQ increase, and teachers and parents reported significant improvements in academic performance and behavior. No such differences were evident in the two controls, Neville says, suggesting that parental involvement was key.

Many existing programs try to help young children of low socioeconomic status develop the skills needed to thrive in school, but “almost all happen without any scientifically designed pre-vs. post-behavioral or neural measures,” says Rajeev Raizada, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York. This study is one of the first to combine such tests with an intervention, he says. Such interventions “are of great interest scientifically, because they are about as close as you can get to experimental research on the effects of child poverty on the brain,” says Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Raizada cautions that the parental training program was broad, making it hard to know which aspects were really crucial, he says. “Another crucial question is how long-lasting will the kids’ gains be?” he adds. “A common feature of intervention programs is that they tend to produce some immediate gains, but those gains often tend to fade out over subsequent months.”

Before implementing programs based on the new study, Farah says, “we need to invest in replication, fine-tuning, and all the hard work of bringing a program to scale.” Still, given striking improvements seen in just 8 weekly sessions, “I think that we need to regard these results as wonderful news,” she says.

Filed under preschoolers attention brain activity socioeconomic status psychology neuroscience science

119 notes

Brain differences seen in depressed preschoolers

A key brain structure that regulates emotions works differently in preschoolers with depression compared with their healthy peers, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The differences, measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), provide the earliest evidence yet of changes in brain function in young children with depression. The researchers say the findings could lead to ways to identify and treat depressed children earlier in the course of the illness, potentially preventing problems later in life.

image

“The findings really hammer home that these kids are suffering from a very real disorder that requires treatment,” said lead author Michael S. Gaffrey, PhD. “We believe this study demonstrates that there are differences in the brains of these very young children and that they may mark the beginnings of a lifelong problem.”

The study is published in the July issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Depressed preschoolers had elevated activity in the brain’s amygdala, an almond-shaped set of neurons important in processing emotions. Earlier imaging studies identified similar changes in the amygdala region in adults, adolescents and older children with depression, but none had looked at preschoolers with depression.

For the new study, scientists from Washington University’s Early Emotional Development Program studied 54 children ages 4 to 6. Before the study began, 23 of those kids had been diagnosed with depression. The other 31 had not. None of the children in the study had taken antidepressant medication.

Although studies using fMRI to measure brain activity by monitoring blood flow have been used for years, this is the first time that such scans have been attempted in children this young with depression. Movements as small as a few millimeters can ruin fMRI data, so Gaffrey and his colleagues had the children participate in mock scans first. After practicing, the children in this study moved less than a millimeter on average during their actual scans.

While they were in the fMRI scanner during the study, the children looked at pictures of people whose facial expressions conveyed particular emotions. There were faces with happy, sad, fearful and neutral expressions.

“The amygdala region showed elevated activity when the depressed children viewed pictures of people’s faces,” said Gaffrey, an assistant professor of psychiatry. “We saw the same elevated activity, regardless of the type of faces the children were shown. So it wasn’t that they reacted only to sad faces or to happy faces, but every face they saw aroused activity in the amygdala.”

Looking at pictures of faces often is used in studies of adults and older children with depression to measure activity in the amygdala. But the observations in the depressed preschoolers were somewhat different than those previously seen in adults, where typically the amygdala responds more to negative expressions of emotion, such as sad or fearful faces, than to faces expressing happiness or no emotion.

In the preschoolers with depression, all facial expressions were associated with greater amygdala activity when compared with their healthy peers.

Gaffrey said it’s possible depression affects the amygdala mainly by exaggerating what, in other children, is a normal amygdala response to both positive and negative facial expressions of emotion. But more research will be needed to prove that. He does believe, however, that the amygdala’s reaction to people’s faces can be seen in a larger context.

“Not only did we find elevated amygdala activity during face viewing in children with depression, but that greater activity in the amygdala also was associated with parents reporting more sadness and emotion regulation difficulties in their children,” Gaffrey said. “Taken together, that suggests we may be seeing an exaggeration of a normal developmental response in the brain and that, hopefully, with proper prevention or treatment, we may be able to get these kids back on track.”

(Source: news.wustl.edu)

Filed under depression amygdala fMRI brain activity preschoolers face processing neuroscience science

104 notes

'I don't want to pick!' Preschoolers know when they aren't sure Children as young as 3 years old know when they are not sure about a decision, and can use that uncertainty to guide decision making, according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. "There is behavioral evidence that they can do this, but the literature has assumed that until late preschool, children cannot introspect and make a decision based on that introspection," said Simona Ghetti, professor of psychology at UC Davis and co-author of the study with graduate student Kristen Lyons, now an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. [Preschoolers Use Introspection to Make Decisions] The findings are published online by the journal Child Development and will appear in print in an upcoming issue. Ghetti studies how reasoning, memory and cognition emerge during childhood. It is known that children get better at introspection through elementary school, she said. Lyons and Ghetti wanted to see whether this ability to ponder exists in younger children. Previous studies have used open-ended questions to find out how children feel about a decision, but that approach is limited by younger children’s ability to report on the content of their mental activity. Instead, Lyons and Ghetti showed 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds ambiguous drawings of objects and asked them to point to a particular object, such as a cup, a car or the sun. Then they asked the children to point to one of two pictures of faces, one looking confident and one doubtful, to rate whether they were confident or not confident about a decision. In one of the tests, children had to choose a drawing even if unsure. In a second set of tests they had a “don’t want to pick” option. Across the age range, children were more likely to say they were not confident about their decision when they had in fact made a wrong choice. When they had a “don’t know” option, they were most likely to take it if they had been unsure of their choice in the “either/or” test. By opting not to choose when uncertain, the children could improve their overall accuracy on the test. "Children as young as 3 years of age are aware of when they are making a mistake, they experience uncertainty that they can introspect on, and then they can use that introspection to drive their decision making," Ghetti said. The researchers hope to extend their studies to younger children to examine the emergence of introspection and reasoning. (Image: Jupiter Images)

'I don't want to pick!' Preschoolers know when they aren't sure

Children as young as 3 years old know when they are not sure about a decision, and can use that uncertainty to guide decision making, according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis.

"There is behavioral evidence that they can do this, but the literature has assumed that until late preschool, children cannot introspect and make a decision based on that introspection," said Simona Ghetti, professor of psychology at UC Davis and co-author of the study with graduate student Kristen Lyons, now an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. [Preschoolers Use Introspection to Make Decisions]

The findings are published online by the journal Child Development and will appear in print in an upcoming issue.

Ghetti studies how reasoning, memory and cognition emerge during childhood. It is known that children get better at introspection through elementary school, she said. Lyons and Ghetti wanted to see whether this ability to ponder exists in younger children.

Previous studies have used open-ended questions to find out how children feel about a decision, but that approach is limited by younger children’s ability to report on the content of their mental activity. Instead, Lyons and Ghetti showed 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds ambiguous drawings of objects and asked them to point to a particular object, such as a cup, a car or the sun. Then they asked the children to point to one of two pictures of faces, one looking confident and one doubtful, to rate whether they were confident or not confident about a decision.

In one of the tests, children had to choose a drawing even if unsure. In a second set of tests they had a “don’t want to pick” option.

Across the age range, children were more likely to say they were not confident about their decision when they had in fact made a wrong choice. When they had a “don’t know” option, they were most likely to take it if they had been unsure of their choice in the “either/or” test.

By opting not to choose when uncertain, the children could improve their overall accuracy on the test.

"Children as young as 3 years of age are aware of when they are making a mistake, they experience uncertainty that they can introspect on, and then they can use that introspection to drive their decision making," Ghetti said.

The researchers hope to extend their studies to younger children to examine the emergence of introspection and reasoning.

(Image: Jupiter Images)

Filed under decision making children preschoolers reasoning cognition introspection psychology neuroscience science

free counters