Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Why Toddlers Don't Do What They're Told

From Live Science:

Are you listening to me? Didn't I just tell you to get your coat? Helloooo! It's cold out there...

So goes many a conversation between parent and toddler. It seems everything you tell them either falls on deaf ears or goes in one ear and out the other. But that's not how it works.

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.

"I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings," said psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different."

Read more ....

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