The Thinking Project

As adults, we recognize that there are a lot of factors that can influence how accurate someone's judgment will be. We understand, for instance, that a judge is more likely to make an accurate judgment if he or she has relevant background knowledge and has had previous experience making decisions. We also recognize that there are times when people's judgments may be less accurate, like if the judge hasn't gotten enough sleep, or if a judge's best friend is involved.

For this project , we present children with stories about different kinds of contests, with different potential judges, and we ask questions to try to understand how children decide what qualities are important for making someone a good judge. For example, children might hear stories involving contests with objective criteria (e.g., running race, pie eating contest) and contests with more subjective criteria (e.g., beauty contest, talent contest). For each story, children answer questions about the contests, like how the judges made the decisions, or how accurate their decisions were. This project, with children ages 5 to 14, aims to measure how children evaluate decisions and how that changes across development.


The Detective Game

In this project, preschoolers will hear stories about different kinds of events, but the endings to those stories will be unclear. "Clues" will be provided to help children figure out what really happened. We are interested in what kinds of "clues" children use to figure out and understand the stories they hear.


Using Questions for Problem Solving

In collaboration with Cristine Legare at the University of Texas at Austin, we are examining how children ask questions to solve problems. Children like to ask questions from a very young age for many reasons: to get attention, to obtain facts (e.g., “What’s that animal called?”), and to understand things (e.g., “Why do people have birthday parties?”). We know that in elementary school children have to ask questions to solve problems, but we don’t know much about how this ability develops. Therefore, our study with children ages 3 to 7 to look at this very issue. 


Learning from Listening

In collaboration with Judith Danovitch at Michigan State University, we are developing a project examining how young children learn from overhearing others solve problems. Stay tuned for more information!


The Development of Cynicism

We often think of young children as being quite gullible, believing anything they hear. But it is quite important for children to be able to evaluate the quality of the information they encounter: to understand that there are times when people might be motivated by their self-interest in the statements they make, and to know to discount those statements accordingly.

For these studies, we are using scenarios that are familiar to children (sports competitions or game playing) and asking them to judge how much they believe characters making statements that are with or against their own self-interests. We're also exploring what kinds of explanations children endorse for how self-interests could impact what people say or believe. Some of this research was published in Psychological Science in May of 2005. It was also featured in the New York Times "Year in Ideas" and in Science Magazine as an "Editor's Choice"! You can read the press on the article in the "Links" section of the website.


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2007

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