U of M Institute of Child Development

I’m a sucker for research…so when the student researcher from the U of M called to see if we were interested in having Nolan participate in a behavioral study focusing on attention and learning in infancy and early childhood, I scheduled the appointment.

“The purpose of this study was to explore the role of attention in everyday learning. Previous research has shown that infants and young children are sensitive to regularities in their surroundings and can learn about patterns of objects or events that occur together. While this learning often occurs unintentionally, it is unclear whether focused attention is necessary for this type of pattern learning.”

For his experiment, Nolan sat on my lap and viewed a rudimentary movie displaying shapes and sounds on a very large computer screen while Collin and Aaron played with another student researcher. Nolan was free to watch the movie while he was interested, and look away when he became bored, while the researcher used a standard video camera to record his eye movements. I think the highlight for both of us was when the experiment was interrupted by the old school Sesame Street Ladybug picnic movie.



Collin has also participated in an ICD study, in May of 2008 shortly after his third birthday. His researchers were “interested in determining what components of training are vital to training the conscious regulation of thought and behavior and whether the conscious regulation of thought and behavior can be trained in a relatively short period of time.”

Collin, while wearing an EEG net on his head, was asked to play a computer game where he sorted items on the screen by shapes and colors. During the game he was awarded with stickers. After he completed the exercise, the researcher then taught him how to play the game. Children his age can typically sort by the first dimension (by shape, for example), but have trouble switching to the other dimension (color). The researchers were attempting to determine whether it was possible to teach children to differentiate and which type of teaching was most effective. We returned the following day to repeat the exercise and determine if his performance changed.