Some Video Games Can Make Children Kinder And More Likely To Help

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ScienceDaily (June 18, 2009) — Some video games can make children kinder and more likely to help—not hurt—other people.

That's the conclusion of new research published in the June 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The article presents the findings of three separate studies, conducted in different countries with different age groups, and using different scientific approaches. All the studies find that playing games with prosocial content causes players to be more helpful to others after the game is over.
The report is co-authored by a consortium of researchers from the United States, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia.
"Dozens of studies have documented a relationship between violent video games and aggressive behaviors," said lead author Douglas Gentile, an Iowa State University psychologist. "But this is one of the first that has documented the positive effects of playing prosocial games."
Prosocial video games involve characters who help and support each other in nonviolent ways.
"These studies show the same kind of impact on three different age groups from three very different cultures," said Brad Bushman, a University of Michigan co-author of the report. "In addition, the studies use different analytic approaches—correlational, longitudinal and experimental. The resulting triangulation of evidence provides the strongest possible proof that the findings are both valid and generalizable."
"These studies document that children and adolescents learn from practicing behaviors in games," said Rowell Huesmann, a U-M co-author of the report.
One study examined the link between video game habits and prosocial behavior among 727 secondary students in Singapore, with a mean age of 13. Students listed their favorite games and rated how often game characters helped, hurt or killed other characters. They also answered questions about how likely they were to spend time and money helping people in need, to cooperate with others and share their belongings, and to react aggressively in various situations.
As in numerous other studies, the researchers found a strong correlation between playing violent video games and hurting others. But the study also found a strong correlation between playing prosocial games and helping others.
The second study analyzed the long-term connection between video game habits and prosocial behavior in nearly 2,000 Japanese children ages 10 to 16. Participants completed a survey about their exposure to prosocial video games, and rated how often they had helped other people in the last month. Three to four months later, they were surveyed again, and researchers found a significant connection between exposure to prosocial games and helpful behavior months later.
"This suggests there is an upward spiral of prosocial gaming and helpful behavior, in contrast to the downward spiral that occurs with violent video gaming and aggressive behavior," said Bushman, a professor of communications and psychology and a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).
For the third study, the researchers carried out an experiment with 161 U.S. college students, with a mean age of 19. After playing either a prosocial, violent, or neutral game, participants were asked to assign puzzles to a randomly selected partner. They could choose from puzzles that were easy, medium or hard to complete. Their partner could win $10 if they solved all the puzzles. Those who played a prosocial game were considerably more helpful than others, assigning more easy puzzles to their partners. And those who had played violent games were significantly more likely to assign the hardest puzzles.
"Taken together, these findings make it clear that playing video games is not in itself good or bad for children," Bushman said."The type of content in the game has a bigger impact than the overall amount of time spent playing."
Adapted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

Native Language Governs The Way Toddlers Interpret Speech Sounds

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071001172817.htm

Science Daily — Toddlers are learning language skills earlier than expected and by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning.
They also ignore sounds that don't play a significant role in speaking their native tongue, according to a study by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist.
The study shows how important the child's first year is in acquiring language. By listening to their parents and learning words, children discover how speech in their language works, a process that is vital for gaining command of vocabulary and grammar.
This is the first time scientists have shown that children as young as 18 months actively interpret the phonetic characteristics of their particular language when they learn words. Previously, scientists had speculated that this ability would emerge much later in life, once children had already amassed large vocabularies.
Previous research showed that at birth infants can distinguish most of the phonetic contrasts used by all the world's languages. This ''universal'' capacity shifts over the first year to a language-specific pattern in which infants retain or improve categorization of native-language sounds but fail to discriminate many non-native sounds. Eventually, they learn to ignore subtle speech distinctions that their language does not use.
This is why Japanese toddlers, like Japanese adults, cannot tell apart the English "r" and "l" sounds and why English speakers have trouble with certain French vowels because they all sound the same to non-native speakers due to language learning in infancy. The Penn study shows that even when two words sound very different, toddlers know whether to take this difference seriously or to chalk it up to random variation depending on how their language works.
"The results demonstrate that at 18 months children have a rudimentary understanding of the 'sound system' of their language and that knowledge guides their interpretation of the sounds they encounter," said Daniel Swingley, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Penn who worked with colleagues from the University of British Columbia and the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.
"Children can easily hear how the same word can be pronounced in different ways. We might say, 'Is that your kiiiiiitty"' or, 'Show me the kitty.' In English, we're still talking about the same cat. But children have to figure this out. In other languages, like Japanese or Finnish, those two versions of "kitty" could mean completely different things. Our study showed that 18-month-olds have already learned this and apply that knowledge when learning new words."
Psychologists tested vowel duration ("kitty" versus "kiiiitty") in three experiments comparing Dutch- and English-learning 18-month-olds. Children were shown two different toys. With one toy, researchers repeated a word dozens of times, naming it a "tam." The other toy was named too, with the same label only with the vowel acoustically longer in duration ("taam").
Dutch children, learning a language that includes words differentiated by how long the vowel is pronounced, interpret the variations as meaningful and learn which word goes with each object. English speakers ignored the elongation of vowel sounds.
English learners did not somehow lack the cognitive power to learn both words. They can hear the difference between the words, and they succeed on words that really are different in English ("tam" vs. "tem"). The difference arose from the phonological generalizations children had already made from their brief experience with English: "tam" and "taam", like "kitty" and "kiiiitty", mean the same thing. Dutch children, on the other hand, interpreted vowel duration as lexically contrastive in keeping with the properties of their language.
The study, to appear in the Oct. 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was funded by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek's Spinoza Prize, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
The study was performed by Swingley, Christiane Dietrich of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics and Janet F. Werker of the University of British Columbia.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by University of Pennsylvania.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Female Anxiety: Females More Likely To Believe Negative Past Events Predict Future

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070928092126.htm

Science Daily — A new study finds that young girls and women are more likely to believe that negative past events predict future events, compared to boys and men. And that, according to researchers, may help explain why females have more frequent and intense worries, perceive more risk, have greater intolerance for uncertainty, and experience higher rates of anxiety than males.
The findings, from studies conducted at the University of California, Davis, are published in the journal Child Development.
In two studies involving 128 people, a researcher investigated 3- to 6-year-olds' as well as adults' knowledge that worry and preventative behaviors can be caused by thinking that a negative event from the past will or might reoccur in the future. The ability to explain emotions and behaviors in relation to past events is considered a fundamental part of adult social understanding that is important for processing past trauma, assessing risk, and making decisions.
In the first study, participants listened to six stories featuring characters that experienced negative events and then, many days later, felt worried or changed their behaviors when they saw the person or animal that had caused them prior harm. Children and adults were asked to explain the cause of the character's worry or behavior and then to predict how a naïve friend would react to the same situation.
The second study was the same as the first, except that the person or animal in the final scene only looked similar to the one that had caused harm in the past. In addition, for some trials, participants were asked to predict how the character was likely to respond to seeing this new person or animal.
Although there were no gender differences in the frequency with which participants provided past-to-future explanations, in both studies, female children and adults more frequently explained characters' reactions as motivated by possible versus certain harm (that is, what might happen versus what will happen). Moreover, female children and adults more frequently predicted that characters who encountered "similar perpetrators" would feel worried because they thought the new person or animal might cause the same harm as the one from the past.
The studies also found that children and adults believe negative past events forecast negative future events, even when the person or animal only resembles the past perpetrator of harm. Between 3 and 6 years of age, children increasingly understand that people's worry and behavior can be caused by allowing memories about past negative events to influence their anticipation of the future, and they are more aware that others who didn't experience or know about the negative past would feel differently and make different decisions.
"These results are significant because they reveal that knowledge about the impact of past-to-future thinking on emotions and behaviors develops during the preschool years," according to Kristin Hansen Lagattuta, assistant professor of psychology, a researcher at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the study.
Summarized from Child Development, Vol. 78, Issue 5, Thinking About the Future Because of the Past: Young Children's Knowledge About the Causes of Worry and Preventative Decisions by Lagattuta, KH (University of California, Davis).
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Society for Research in Child Development.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Reading Process Is Surprisingly Different That Previously Thought, Technology Shows

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070910092543.htm

Science Daily — Being able to read competently is one of the most important skills we need to function in today’s fast-paced society. Analysing the way we read can offer valuable insights into how we process visual information.

Scientists have been interested in the movements of our eyes while reading for forty years. However, until now most assumed that when we read both eyes look at the same letter of a word concurrently.
Now ground-breaking research by cognitive psychologist Professor Simon Liversedge and his team at the University of Southampton has shown that this is not actually the case. They found that our eyes are actually up to something much more exciting when we read - our eyes look at different letters in the same word and then combine the different images through a process known as fusion.
The research Prof. Liversedge will present at the BA Festival of Science in York shows that the reading process is not as simple as one might think; it is rarely a case of the eyes scanning the page smoothly from left to right. Depending on what we are reading and how hard we are finding the information to digest our eyes make small jerky movements, that allow us to focus on a particularly difficult word or often re-read passages we didn’t get the first time. Analysing these eye movements enables psychologists to understand how our brain processes the sentence.
With sophisticated eye tracking equipment able to determine which letter of a font-size 14 word a person is looking at every millisecond from 1 metre away, Prof. Liversedge’s team went one further and looked at the letters within the word within the sentence. They were able to deduce that when our eyes are not looking at the same letter of the word, they are usually about two letters apart. Prof. Liversedge explains: ‘Although this difference might sound small, in fact it represents a very substantial difference in terms of the precise "picture" of the world that each eye delivers to the brain.'
So if our eyes are looking at different parts of the same word, thereby receiving different information from each eye, how is it that we are able to see the words clearly enough to read them? There are two ways the brain can do this; either the image from one of the eyes is blocked or the two different images are somehow fused together. To test how the latter mechanism might work, the team chose words that could easily split in two, such as cowboy, and presented half of the word to the left eye, and half to the right eye separately. They then analysed readers’ eye movements when reading sentences containing these particular words presented in this way.
‘We were able to clearly show that we experience a single, very clear and crisp visual representation due to fusion of the two different images from each eye,’ he explains. ‘Also when we decide which word to look at next we work out how far to move our eyes based on the fused visual representation built from the disparate signals of each eye.
‘A comprehensive understanding of the psychological processes underlying reading is vital if we are to develop better methods of teaching children to read and offer remedial treatments for those with reading disorders such as dyslexia. Our team are now measuring the range of visual disparities over which both adult and child readers can successfully fuse words.’
Professor Simon Liversedge will give his talk, ‘What our eyes get up to while we read’ as part of the session entitled ‘What eye movements tell us about the brain and language’ on 14 September at Vanbrugh V/045, University of York as part of the BA Festival of Science.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com