So do babies/toddlers REALLY think you stop existing during peekaboo?

Factual Questions
41

See? That was a great story!

I feel this way: If I had understood the point of it, I would have learned to read earlier. I feel I was certainly capable. I knew words meant something “Ford” was a car for instance.

My younger sister(by 3 years) had a knack for identifying makes of vehicles. She’d yell out “FORD! SHEB!”(for Chevrolet).

One day we encountered an unusual make of vehicle and she was baffled. Finally in a quiet little voice she said “sh-sh-sh-sheb?”.

It was a Dodge Crew Cab. http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a45/herrkooled/IMAG0038.jpg

42

I never had reading explained to me in a cool way /jealous. I just played this DOS Sesame Street program with my mom that taught letters, and looked over my parent’s shoulders when they read.

Apparently, the first time I read something we were in Walmart, and my mom just figured I recognized a few simple words. Then I accidentally proved them wrong and started looking at things, reading out loud, and understanding the signs and packaging. I think the real tell was that I could read words I didn’t actually know and ask what they meant. I was really young for reading (2 or 2.5 I think), and my parents were kind of just floored and confused.

43

Yup. We tested it. My daughter will be four in October.

We worked for a week on “which is more?” and “are they the same” relatively tricky concepts for toddlers. She understands that one cookie is the biggest, but takes glob types over flat types, even though the flat types look bigger to me.

My son, at 22 months doesn’t understand that yet. His only criteria is that if it’s daddy’s, it must be better.

So, we did the experiment with orange juice, and let her pick the bigger one. It’s pretty funny to watch. She would pour in a full cup of OJ, then dump in into a bowl and pour another full cup, and would never comprehend that they are the same.

Of course, this is someone who consistently-out negotiates her father. I’ll tell her that she will have to have two bites of the hated vegetables in order to get dessert, and she’ll say, “No, three!” We’ll count them out together, so she “ought” to know that two bites are less then three, but she doesn’t. She knows that she used to be two and now she’s three, and she’ll be four in October. She knows that two-year-olds are smaller than three-year-olds at day care. If you ask her if she wants two cookies or three, she’ll pick three consistently, but I tell her to wait two minutes before I play with her, she’ll request it be three. Of course, her younger brother screams if but down for even a second, so at least she’s come this far.

I’m really confused. Have you never been around young children?

44

Ah, yes, the “more is better” mindset. Littlebro (now an accountant) took a long time to get over that stage; the Gramps from Hell thought it was hilarious to trade the kid four pesetas for the boy’s five-peseta coin.

I’ll never understand people who think it’s cool to be mean to a little kid, but I still have more trouble understanding those who think it’s cool to be mean to someone who doesn’t even comprehend they’re being mean :confused:

45

I dunno, there’s trolling and then there’s being mean. There’s a little bit of fun in teasing kids, but a lot of people do take it too far. I don’t think there’s anything wrong, per se, with convincing a kid you had a pet dinosaur when you were little so long as you own up to it when they find a way to corner you on your bullshit.

46

Agreed.

Maybe part of my problem is that, IME, there is a lot of overlap between the people who think it’s funny to make fun of a kid and the people who think it’s ok to be physically hurtful to a kid so long as they can claim “it’s in jest” (80kg man holding down a toddler to tickle him, way after the kid has started saying “no, NOOOO!” or even crying) or say “he’s so cute!” while pinching cheeks or breathing strange fumes way too close to a kid’s face (you know those old ladies with too much makeup and a factory’s worth of perfume? those).

Laughing with the kid is great. Laughing at the kid is not.

47

Well, I congratulate you for trying this out yourself. That’s at least one test. I’m not sure if I want to open this ‘discussion’ up again. If I do, the proper thing to do would be to start a new thread. So feel free to follow up if I do that, or start your own if you like.

48

It’s really one of those things that’s difficult to believe without experience with kids, especially for folks who refuse to read research.

I got to do a variation of the experiment almost by accident a couple years ago with my second-graders. We were doing a unit on weather, and I put a bunch of different containers outside in the rain, and different groups talked about the best way to measure rainfall (the usual way, by height, is pretty counterintuitive, so I wanted the kids to work through the rationale for using this method before I told them how it was done). One group was examining whether it made sense to measure rainfall by volume. As part of my initial questions, I pointed to two containers–a tiny one that was almost full, and a huge one that had a tiny layer of water at the bottom–and asked which container probably held more water.

One student pointed to the smaller one, which baffled me. “Okay, why do you think that one has the most water?” I asked. She answered, “because it’s almost full.” THe other students nodded their heads in agreement.

Except for one boy, who scowled doubtfully and said, “I don’t agree. I think the biggest one is going to have the most water. It’s not full, but it’s a lot bigger, so it can hold a lot more water.”

I asked the students who were listening what they thought, and after a few minutes, they decided the second student’s argument was persuasive.

These students were on the cusp of understanding something about volume that’s not intuitive but that makes complete logical sense. The scowling student was the only one who figured it out on his own, but once he explained it to everyone else, they could see his point.

If you did the same thing with kindergarteners, it’d be highly unlikely that any students would have had his insight.

49

Knowing nothing about measuring rainfall, when measuring rain by volume, wouldn’t you need to take into account the size of the opening? If you were measuring rain, I’d expect two beakers to contain roughly the same volume of water if they had an identically sized and shaped aperture regardless of the overall volume difference of the container itself. (In other words, an open box would catch WAY more water than a beaker, even if the beaker was long enough to have several liters more available volume).

I realize this is kind of unrelated to the problem you mentioned, but now I must know.

50

No, that’s cool; that was actually the point of the lesson :).

The way the lesson was designed, different groups measured rainfall by volume, by temperature, by weight, and by height. We made a grid of the different measurements, and noticed right away that the volume and weight measurements gave drastically different results depending on the size (specifically, as you say, the opening) of the container; after some discussion, students agreed that volume and weight weren’t good ways to measure rainfall.

They noticed that temperature readings were similar across all samples, but agreed that, when someone asked you how much it had rained, telling them the temperature of the rainwater wasn’t an answer to their question.

And they noticed that the height measurements were almost identical to one another, and that the height measurement would vary according to how much it had rained, so they concluded that measuring rainfall by height was the best method of measurement.

Metascientifically, of course, I wanted students to see that a failed experiment often gave important information: the group that measured rainfall by volume had a lot to contribute to the post-experimental discussion, even though their work didn’t yield the “correct” answer.

51

Reading up on rain gauges (which I did in 4th grade and forgot), I don’t think I would have ever arrived at the obtuse method they use. The method I’d probably arrive at would be something like the ratio of the volume of water to the area of the aperture. So a beaker with 255mL (aka cm^3) of water with a 5cm^2 hole would yield 255cm^3/5cm^2 = 51cm of rainfall (or more precisely, approximately 255mL of water falls within every 5cm^2 patch of land). Which, either incidentally or not is still measured in units of length, but not in the odd seemingly over-engineered way Wikipedia mentions.

Of course, I’m sure there’s a good reason why my way doesn’t work.

52

Trying to teach a young child the concept of volume is tall order. Even after explaining that the amount of water is equal in both, children will still say the glass contains more. Volume is an abstract at that age, and they are reporting what they see: taller=more. Your not knowing who Piaget is doesn’t invalidate his research.

53

I dunno. I’m not sure who Heisenberg is, but the idea that you can’t know where something is if you know how fast it’s going is totally ridiculous. Have you actually tested it? I’m gonna go into threads about quantum physics right now and set people straight.

Jragon, I think your method would work, but rain gauges are pretty simple, AIUI: they just imagine all the rain that falls covers the ground in an even layer, and then you see how thick that layer is. Not much rain=thin layer; a crazy rainstorm=thick layer. Are you maybe overthinking it?

54

Heh, I actually misread the Wikipedia article. I thought it said that you subtracted 25mL from the total for some Lovecraftian reason when what they actually said was that by standard the overflow container catches any water over 25mL.

55

If you don’t mind a digression, what is a glob type of cookie?

56

I think he means cookies that are more dome-shaped than disc-shaped. For example, Mexican wedding cookies are almost spherical. If you smashed them flat, they’d have a much larger visual cross-section; it would be easy to make mistakes about which one was really bigger.

57

Isn’t he that guy who cooks crystal meth? :smiley:

58

No, he’s the one who cooks the books. After all he can’t let you predict where the money’s gone.

59

This. When using cookie dough that’s more viscus, the cookies are more dome-shaped. With things are shaped irregularly, then it’s not as obvious which has a greater volume. Flat cookies are bigger around, but glob cookies are taller. The bigger-around seems to be preferable for the older toddler and the younger one just wants either his older sister’s or daddy’s.

I just re-ran the water experiment with my kids this morning.

Further notes:

As we did last time, Beta-chan wanted to know why we were putting water from one container to another. This actually is an important point, as without a good reason, kids are going to get mentally stuck in that question mode and it can invalidate the rest of the test. When we take over the world, the first law I’m passing is that all child development experiments on preschooler are performed by day care teacher. *They *understand kids and are good at giving satisfying answers.

I changed the experiment today. I used three containers for the two volumes of water. Let’s say Volume A and Volume B. I had two bowls, Bowls 1 and Bowl 2, and a glass.

Had Beta-chan poured water into the glass, making it Volume A. Then had her pour Volume A into Bowl 1. Refilled glass with Volume B. Asked which is more. The glass.
Had her pour Volume B into Bowl 2. Now Volumes A and B were the same. Poured Volume A back into the glass. Now it was bigger. Returned to bowl and they were the same. Repeated with Volume B with similar results.

I can only assume the out right dismissals of Piaget’s findings are based on a non-exposure to children, as anyone who has worked with them, been around them for very long or endured temper tantrums because she wants that one will not be surprised.

The idea that there was specific stages of mental development in children apparently was quite radical to researchers. One brain development author (and mother) suggested that was because the researchers used to be overwhelmingly male. Apparently the previous view was that kids were simply less developed or “defective” mini adults.

In Pinker’s book, he describes language acquisition by babies, and goes through the various stages, including learning sounds, cadence, etc., and points out that it’s not all just vocabulary. It’s interesting to watch my children as they try to simultaneously learn three languages with radically different sounds, pitches, cadence, and vocabularies.

The reason this is relevant – at least marginally so – is that child development, including language, is not simply just made up BS. Sure, it’s not completely understood, and there’s nothing more frustrating than reading idiotic conclusions from poorly designed experiments, but we’ve got a greater understanding on how the brain develops than the Puritans did.

60

Also, the transition from one stage to the next is largely a function of exposure to education, media, etc., along with the physical development of the brain. It’s not like the brain suddenly throws a switch and a person then understands concepts like volume vs height or other notions that require some abstract thinking skills and perhaps exposure to mathematical concepts.