Into the Minds of Preschoolers

Tristan Yates is a senior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She was awarded a Fall 2017 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on child development and memory under Dr. Patricia Bauer.

In my honors thesis work, I am investigating whether the structure of newly-learned information impacts preschoolers’ abilities to extend that information to produce novel understandings of related concepts. A large part of this journey has been discovering what it is that preschoolers actually know and care about, and as an aside, it is not always listening to a college-aged researcher, regardless of how many stickers she offers during a session. Prior to entering the Bauer Memory Development Lab, I had little experience within the world of child development. Thus, while developing and validating new stimuli for the lab’s memory integration paradigm, I overestimated the types of information four-year-olds could hold in their little brains. This summer, my graduate student mentor constantly reminded me of this, saying, “No, Tristan, they won’t know what the Eiffel Tower is” and “Yes, it is highly possible they could not point to where their lungs are located in their body.” Although young children have been shown to integrate some forms of information into their existing knowledge base quite readily (e.g., new names for familiar objects), they often struggle to integrate concepts that are hierarchically organized and fail to perform transitive inference on demand. My project seeks to demonstrate these disparities, and I have enjoyed observing individual differences in children’s ability to integrate and extend their knowledge. Some children do in fact guess randomly when given the forced-choice integration question. I had one child tell me that LaLa, one of the puppets I use to determine whether or not children understand the novel integration relation, was always going to be correct no matter what, because her fur was yellow and yellow is the best color. However, some children truly surprise me with their understanding of the task and their memory for novel information. With some kids, I can literally see on their faces when the information “clicks,” and they know that they know the correct answer. It is exhilarating when this happens, and I have to stop myself from immediately emailing my peers in the lab in excitement.

By characterizing individual differences that may account for the successful acquisition of hierarchical knowledge in young children, I am gaining insight into the productive extension of knowledge relevant to spatial reasoning, with the ultimate goal of maximizing learning outcomes for children over time. In pilot testing, I realized that hinting at the relatedness of two facts vastly improved children’s performances, and that this could be important for intervening when knowledge integration becomes difficult. Additionally, reading the stories twice to the children helped them to better retain novel facts in their (arguably limited) memory. At first, I had worried that hearing the same story twice would bore the children, but almost all of them have been more than eager to read my stories again—three of them even clapped for me! It has been so rewarding to work with human participants, and to observe the learning process unfold in real-time.  I feel that this experience has validated my decision to attend graduate school and further explore how cognitive processes impact learning and memory. Additionally, my research with preschoolers has taught me that Paw Patrol is the coolest thing on TV at the moment. Receiving an independent research grant this semester has allowed me to compensate my participants with toys, stickers, and Child Study Center t-shirts that I designed. I am so grateful that this grant helps me to thank the children who are contributing to science through my study.  

Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.