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Why Toddlers Don't Do What They're Told
Hugh Pickens writes "New cognitive research shows that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present, but instead call up the past as they need it. 'There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different,' says professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Munakata's team used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine mental effort to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds. The research concluded that while everything you tell toddlers seems to go in one ear and out the other, the study found that toddlers listen, but then store the information for later use. 'For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,' says doctoral student Christopher Chatham. 'You might expect the child to plan for the future, think "OK it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm." But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.'"
so you invested in Bernie Madoff too? lol. Everyone looks back and thinks "awww, that's right, he's not a real investor." You know the only reason he didn't scam toddlers is cuz they don't have any money lol.
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Let's put the research in the context of other cognitive findings. Here's what I would speculate.
1) Abstracting the experience: A three year old's brain is learning to abstract elements of the experience.
2) Associative modeling: It then uses that associative "this is like / not-like" comparison of a new situation to the stored model.
3) Time: The kid's sense of present-versus-future is still developing; this goes back to babies enjoying presence-absence a.k.a. peek-a-boo play.
4) Linear sense of time - I'm sure you know adults who can't order things into a linear time sequence. Planning is a learned, not an innate, ability that is best learned before the teen years.
5) Models - How well a kid uses models from the prefrontal cortex is also critical to that kid's control of impulsivity. Thoughtful kids may seem to be hesitant with new situations, and probably easily overwhelmed (overstimulated)with sensory input, compared to the kids we call impulsive (or worse).
6) Decisions: The kid's ability to make logical (causal) predictions (decisions) depends on its yet developing sophistication to decide if the stored model fits the situation.
7) Creativity: The child's mind wants to explore and learn - i.e., test its models, change the models, create new models, or go out into the cold without that prescribed coat.
8) Our role: We should encourage play and provide an emotionally safe environment for the experimentation - i.e., the child's intellect to develop.
9) Under the hood: The brain's prefrontal cortex abstracts experiences and constructs a logical model: If this, then this. Alternatively, the amygdala might create an emotional model - especially from traumatic situations - for a more visceral or instantaneous reaction.
10) "Intuition" is the sophisticated ability to make a decision by quickly retrieving the best-fit model for that situation; BTW, consider how your sensibility might change if the English language did not have a future verb tense: then, consider that the Japanese language doesn't!
I've found it fun and useful (www.matrixed.org) to track these studies on cognitive development.