Promoting broad and stable improvements in low-income children's numerical knowledge through playing number board games

Theoretical analyses of the development of numerical representations suggest that playing linear number board games should enhance young children's numerical knowledge. Consistent with this prediction, playing such a game for roughly 1 hr increased low-income preschoolers' (mean age = 5.4 years) proficiency on 4 diverse numerical tasks: numerical magnitude comparison, number line estimation, counting, and numeral identification. The gains remained 9 weeks later. Classmates who played an identical game, except for the squares varying in color rather than number, did not improve on any measure. Also as predicted, home experience playing number board games correlated positively with numerical knowledge. Thus, playing number board games with children from low-income backgrounds may increase their numerical knowledge at the outset of school.     

Buy low, sell high: the development of an informal theory of economics

Two experiments were conducted to examine the development of economic understanding among 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds (n = 31, 29, and 32, respectively). Most 5-year-olds exhibited understanding of the goal of acquiring desired goods but not of the goals of seeking profits, acquiring goods inexpensively, or competing successfully with other sellers. In contrast, most 7-year-olds and a large majority of 9-year-olds showed understanding of all of these concepts. The older children's understanding of these key concepts and the relations among them suggested that they had constructed an informal theory of economics, qualitatively different from the psychologically based understanding of the 5-year-olds. Increased information-processing skills appeared to be among the sources of this new understanding.     

The development of nonverbal working memory and executive control processes in adolescents

The prefrontal cortex modulates executive control processes and structurally matures throughout adolescence. Consistent with these events, prefrontal functions that demand high levels of executive control may mature later than those that require working memory but decreased control. To test this hypothesis, adolescents (9 to 20 years old) completed nonverbal working memory tasks with varying levels of executive demands. Findings suggest that recall-guided action for single units of spatial information develops until 11 to 12 years. The ability to maintain and manipulate multiple spatial units develops until 13 to 15 years. Strategic self-organization develops until ages 16 to 17 years. Recognition memory did not appear to develop over this age range. Implications for prefrontal cortex organization by level of processing are discussed.     

The rebirth of children's learning

Learning is a central part of children's lives, but the study of learning is a rather peripheral part of the field of cognitive development. Fortunately, this situation is starting to change; recent theoretical and methodological advances have sparked renewed interest in children's learning. This renewed interest has already yielded a set of consistent and interesting findings regarding how children learn, as well as intriguing proposals regarding the mechanisms that underlie the learning. Increasing our focus on children's learning promises to yield practical benefits as well as a more exciting field of cognitive development.     

A metaphor at midlife: 'The Tragedy of the Commons' turns 40

Since 1968, when Garrett Hardin wrote his essay entitled 'The Tragedy of the Commons', the idea that human reproduction must be brought under the coercive control of state power has been rejected by every government on earth, with the qualified exception of the People's Republic of China. The metaphor that Hardin used to convey his message, however, has proliferated, adapted and evolved. Its original neo-Malthusian message now largely forgotten, 'The Tragedy of the Commons' has become a wildly popular metaphor in a variety of fields from ecology to property law to the programmatic architecture of the Internet.     

Evaluating the TD model of classical conditioning

The temporal-difference (TD) algorithm from reinforcement learning provides a simple method for incrementally learning predictions of upcoming events. Applied to classical conditioning, TD models suppose that animals learn a real-time prediction of the unconditioned stimulus (US) on the basis of all available conditioned stimuli (CSs). In the TD model, similar to other error-correction models, learning is driven by prediction errors-the difference between the change in US prediction and the actual US. With the TD model, however, learning occurs continuously from moment to moment and is not artificially constrained to occur in trials. Accordingly, a key feature of any TD model is the assumption about the representation of a CS on a moment-to-moment basis. Here, we evaluate the performance of the TD model with a heretofore unexplored range of classical conditioning tasks. To do so, we consider three stimulus representations that vary in their degree of temporal generalization and evaluate how the representation influences the performance of the TD model on these conditioning tasks.     

Relations between colorblind socialization and children's racial bias: evidence from European American mothers and their preschool children

To examine European American parents’ racial socialization, mothers (n = 84) were videotaped while reading 2 race‐themed books to their 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children and completed surveys concerning their racial attitudes and behaviors. Children completed measures of their racial attitudes and both groups (mothers and preschoolers) predicted the others’ racial attitudes. Results indicated that nearly all mothers adopted “colormute” and “colorblind” approaches to socialization. Furthermore, neither children nor mothers accurately predicted the others’ views. Children’s racial attitudes were unrelated to their mothers’ attitudes but were predicted by their mothers’ cross‐race friendships; those children whose mothers had a higher percentage of non‐European American friends showed lower levels of racial biases than those children whose mothers had a lower percentage of non‐European American friends.