A new study sheds light on the way young children think

For parents who have found themselves repeating the same warnings or directions to their toddler over and over to no avail, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder offers them an answer as to why their toddlers don’t listen to their advice: they’re just storing it away for later.

Scientists — and many parents — have long believed that children’s brains operate like those of little adults. The thinking was that over time kids learn things like proactively planning for and understanding how actions in the present affect them in the future. But the new study suggests that this is not the case.

“The good news is what we’re saying to our kids doesn’t go in one ear and out the other, like people might have thought,” said CU-Boulder psychology Professor Yuko Munakata, who conducted the study with CU doctoral student Christopher Chatham and Michael Frank of Brown University. “It also doesn’t go in and then get put into action like it does with adults. But rather it goes in and gets stored away for later.”

A paper on their study titled “Pupillometric and Behavioral Markers of a Developmental Shift in the Temporal Dynamics of Cognitive Control” will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 23 [continue reading…]