TCNJ researcher looks into a toddler’s world of possibilities | News

A new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds a new light on how young children think about possibilities.

The study, led by Aimee Stahl, associate professor of psychology, found that children as young as two can intuitively distinguish between impossible events and possible but improbable events — and that they learn better from impossible events.

In an experiment involving three toy-filled gumball machines and 335 two- and three-year-olds,

Stahl and research partner Lisa Feigenson, co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development, taught children that, like a regular gumball machine, inserting a coin would yield a prize. One machine contained equal parts pink and purple toys; another contained mostly purple toys but one pink toy; and a third machine contained only purple toys. Regardless of the machine the child was presented with, the prize dispensed was always the same: the pink toy.

Once dispensed, the researchers taught the children a novel word for the pink toy — “blick” — and then measured how well they learned that new word by asking them to pick the blick from a lineup of other toys.

When a blick was dispensed from a machine that contained a pink toy — even if just one pink toy — the kids seemed unfazed and often forgot the toy’s name. But when the blick came out of the machine full of only purple toys, the kids usually remembered the toy’s name when later asked to pick it out of the lineup.

“When the pink toy appears out of nowhere as if by magic, kids are driven to explain that event,” Stahl says. “They’re curious about it. Our results show that young children are keen to seek information about these events that violate their expectations, which impels them to learn more effectively.”

A child’s ability to reason about what is possible, even if it is statistically improbable, is an impressive feat, Stahl says, since they do not yet have the language to express these concepts.

Stahl started this research as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and is carrying it forward in her work in TCNJ’s Cognitive Development Lab — or “Baby Lab” as it is known on campus — housed on the first floor of the Social Sciences Building.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, is an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences. The journal is global in scope and submission is open to all researchers worldwide.

— Emily W. Dodd ’03