New paper with Ben Morris and Alex Shaw out last week in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! We find that children are sensitive to who has better evidence when evaluating how people behave in disagreements.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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🧠💥 New Paper Alert! Congratulations to our very own @sarahkiefer.bsky.social & Dr. David Sobel - Children's decision to challenge themselves on a novel task relates to their metacognitive monitoring of their ability
Check it out here: doi.org/10.1093/chid...
These results suggest that children were not merely attending to what they experienced most recently. Rather, they reasoned about their experience with more challenging tasks across their goal pursuit to control their decision making about future efforts adaptively.
We found that children were more likely to choose a harder instruction when they had done well on previously hard tasks throughout the procedure. Accuracy on easy instructions did not relate to their subsequent decisions.
Experimental schematic. After building a practice toy, children made a series of choices between easy and hard building instructions to construct a larger gear toy. After making each choice, they received 90 s to match the building instruction and were given explicit feedback on their accuracy. Children repeated these choice trials until the toy was completed.
In our novel task, children built a gear machine by choosing between easy and hard building instructions. After each choice, children completed the instruction and received performance feedback before making their next choice.
Between 5-7, children are undergoing important developmental changes in metacognitive reasoning and begin to confront novel challenges in the classroom. Yet, findings are mixed and limited regarding children's capacities to monitor and control their efforts over the course of a continuous goal.
New paper out in Child Development (@srcdorg.bsky.social) with Dave Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social)! ✨ We investigated how 5- to 7-year-old children decide to take on easy versus hard tasks while pursuing a goal. doi.org/10.1093/chid...
Figure shows the methods used in the paper's experiments. In the left column are the methods for Exp 1 (Collection) and in the right are the methods for Exp 2 (Distribution). In each video, three women sit at a table. One sits in the middle, serving as a collector/distributor, and two sit in the foreground with plates. During familiarization trials, resources were collected from or distributed to their plates with an occluder on the screen hiding the outcomes. During test trials, the same videos were played but with the outcomes shown such that infants either viewed an equal collection/distribution or an unequal collection/distribution.
Out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @jaeminhwang.bsky.social, David Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social), and @jessicas.bsky.social! Most studies of infants’ fairness expectations focus on resource distribution, but in everyday life, we engage in many different kinds of resource exchanges.
Lastly, I highly encourage thrill rides as a networking opportunity. 10/10. Thank you, mall of america.
This has been a challenging time for many, and it was encouraging to spend time with old and new friends who share similar passions (and concerns) about the future of our field, and are striving to persist in the face of these obstacles.
It was an absolute pleasure discussing critical topics in children's persistence with each of these rockstars. Keep an eye out for incoming papers from each of us! 🤩
Last week I gave my 1st conference talk at #SRCD2025 in a symposium @elisemahaffey.bsky.social and I co-chaired together “The effort equation: Towards an integrative understanding of the factors that drive children’s adaptive persistence” with speakers @elainewang.bsky.social and Alexis Burke!
The Early Child Cognition Research Group at ASU (PIs: Kelsey Lucca and Viridiana Benitez) will be presenting our work at #SRCD2025! Hope to see you there!
Come see our work @srcdorg.bsky.social! See details below for talks, posters, and locations! Looking forward to it‼️
