no richard gere jokes! and anyway, that was a hamster. totally different animal, so to speak.
anyway, jack is a subject of scientific research. first with umd and now with georgetown university. last weekend, amidst the craziness of the shower-throwing, we had a researcher come over to see jack and take some "baselines" that will help them in their experiment designs.
they were trying to figure out if children 15 and 16 months of age could figure out certain ideas, but not figure them out too easily.
the first task was to look at customized "toy" with a button on the front which, when pushed, makes a sound. it's for an experiment to determine if young children can extrapolate demonstrations they see in 2d ... i.e., television ... to 3d ... i.e., real life. but, before they can do the experiment, they had to make sure that 3d-t0-3d extrapolation was possible by kids jack's age (the aforementioned "baseline"). jack proved that, yes, it is possible. and, apparently, it's also possible for kids his age to destroy the customized toy in mere seconds. or maybe he's just advanced in his destructive skill set.
the next task was to look at a hand puppet wearing a mitten. the trick here was to make sure that once shown it was removable, a child could figure out how to take the mitten off ... but that it wasn't *so* easy that every single child was able to take it off before even seeing the demonstration. here too, jack excelled at removing the mitten once he saw the tester do it.
we're going to be switching to participation in studies for the early learning project instead of continuing with maryland because they have weekend appointments and they come to you (rather than driving to college park). but we have one more study in the language department at maryland that we've committed to this weekend. they were willing to do this one on a saturday and mommy likes that they're close to ikea! plus they give you a small toy for participating ...
ah, the things we do for science!
No comments:
Post a Comment