Just imagine

As humans, imagination is one of our most wonderful traits. It is what lets us laugh at a joke, appreciate a good book, even empathize with our fellow human beings. Thanks to our imagination, we can picture a funny event, conjure images of vistas described in a travelogue, and put ourselves in someone else's shoes. At it's most basic level, imagination allows us to form representations of things, and people that are not present at that moment, or events that happened in the past or will take place in the future. In fact, our memories could be thought of as representations.

While telling your toddler about somebody who's not present, like Grandma, have you ever wondered whether your little tot can actually think about Grandma when you talk about her? It turns out that not-quite-2-year-olds do have the beginnings of an imagination!

Studies done in the 1970's by pioneering scientists such as Janellen Huttenlocher showed us that babies who are just over a year a old can understand references to a familiar object that is absent at that moment. That is, if you mention the name of a familiar toy to a 13- to 14-month-old such as "Teddy!" or "Doggy!", the baby will start looking for it, even if that toy is not visible at that moment. This tells us that by the time they're past their first birthday, babies have some sort of mental representation of familiar objects. In other words, the beginnings of an imagination.

More recently, a series of ingenious studies by Boston University researcher, Patricia Ganea and her colleagues have shown us how this ability develops between a child's first and second birthday.

One of the first questions the researchers asked was, " If babies can remember familiar objects, can they also remember an object that they've recently learned a name for?" The answer was a yes! In order to find out, the researchers taught 13- and 14-month- olds a proper name for a stuffed toy. So, they 'introduced' the baby to a stuffed frog, let the baby play with this toy and while playing with it, told the baby that the frog was called 'Lucy'. The name was repeated several times, after which the stuffed frog was removed from view. Now, when the baby heard the name 'Lucy', the baby spontaneously started searching for the frog! This shows us that babies that are just over a year old can 'think' of a familiar toy when that toy is named, and can also 'remember' a relatively novel toy when that toy is mentioned. However, one must note that at this age this memory or representation is fairly fragile. That is, if there is a delay between learning the name for a new toy and when the name is mentioned in the absence of the toy, babies are less likely to search for the toy.

Well, it's one thing to remember an object when you hear the name, but it's quite another to update that representation if you're given some additional information about that object. For example, suppose Grandma tells you on the phone that she's dyed her hair purple, you would be able to picture her with purple hair, even if you hadn't actually seen her yet. It would be a disturbing image, but you could do it!

Similarly, the next question that Ganea and her colleagues asked was 'what is the youngest age at which children can update their representations of objects based on verbal information?' The study was done with children of two age groups- a group of 1.5- year -olds and a second group of almost 2- year-olds (22- month-olds). Just like in the previous study, stuffed animals were used. Toddlers were 'introduced' to 3 stuffed animals, two of which were identical (stuffed frogs) and a third animal that was different ( a stuffed pig). The children were told that one of the frogs was called 'Lucy', the other frog was 'Lucy's friend' (and this frog was placed on a little stool where he/she could 'watch the others play'), and the stuffed pig was simply called 'the piggy'. This was done to ensure that children had equal amounts of 'face-time' or experience with each of the stuffed animals.

After being allowed to play with the stuffed toys for a few minutes, the children were taken to another room. Soon another researcher came into this room with a little bucket of water and announced that she was going 'to wash the table in the other room'. At this time, the children were encouraged to look at the water and touch it. The researcher left the room and returned in a few minutes, now announcing that 'she had spilled water on Lucy and Lucy was all wet!'. Then the children were taken back to the original room where 3 trays were placed on a low table, one containing a wet stuffed frog, a second containing a dry stuffed frog and the third containing a wet stuffed pig. The children were now asked to 'find Lucy'.

What did the children do? It turns out that most of the older children (the 22-month-olds) correctly identified the wet frog as Lucy, but most of the 1.5 -year- olds did not! These younger kids were just as likely to pick the dry frog as the wet frog. By demonstrating that it is sometime in the second half of their second year that children learn to use verbal information to update their mental images, these studies provide us with a little peep-hole into how imagination and the relationship between language and imagination develops in our children's minds.

Who's the leader?

" Dylan, look here, look here, look at this cool red car! No, stop playing with the wrapping, look at the car!" Does that sound familiar? How often do you try to engage your little one in something that, in your eyes, is obviously exciting, but he just seems to be fascinated by something else altogether? Well, take heart. Every time you find yourself in such a conflict of interest, you might do well do abandon your own pet project (whatever it might be) and start talking about your child's current object of affection. A study done by M. Tomasello and M. Farrar showed that when 1.5 year olds are taught new words for objects, they learn better when an adult talks about and labels objects to which the kids are already attending, as compared to when the adult tries to redirect their attention away to another object and talk about that object instead.
And in case, you were wondering the objects used in the study were equated for their 'fun quotient'. This means that the researchers made sure that the toy that the child was attending to and the toy that the adult was trying to trying to draw his/her attention to were equally fun. This precaution rules out the possibility that in this study children learned better when the toy was more interesting (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986)
Bottomline: Try to 'follow-in' on what your child is attending to, as far as possible. Let him/her take the lead! Of course this makes most sense in your child's first two years, and might not apply later.

What this blog is about

This being my first post, let me begin by telling readers what they can expect to see on this blog. I'm a developmental psychologist. While pursuing my PhD at Cornell, I found myself surrounded by scores of diligent developmental scientists, each of us immersed in tons of exciting data that often revealed the most fascinating insights into the minds of children. Our young research participants ranged in age from the tiniest infants to chatty (and often sassy) preschoolers. We would publish (or more often than not, try to publish) our findings in prestigious academic journals, where they would be read by other diligent scientists, and that would be the end of it until an eager graduate student was inspired by our findings to launch a new study, in which case, his/her results in turn would follow the same fate.
And all through this process, I couldn't get rid of the nagging feeling that our exciting findings were never reaching the eyes and ears of real parents in the real world, for whom these cool insights might be truly useful!
Now that I have graduated with those three elusive letters, p h d, attached to my name, I've finally decided to do just that- somehow bring those research findings to those curious parents, who really want to know what goes on in the minds of their children.
So in this blog, you can expect to find the latest findings, big and small, in the area of child development, presented to you in the most accessible and relevant way possible.
And before I sign off, some of you might be wondering about the name 'wide open'. Well, those two words sum up for me the state of a child's mind from the moment she is born (and in fact, even before!). Those minds are wide open, ready to soak up all the experiences and sensations that will surround them, and most importantly, those minds are absolutely ready to learn from these sounds, images, smells, and yes, even the thoughts all around them.