Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 3

Research Paper Example (Jaswal et.al, 2009) The implications of this finding are quite profound, for it alters the way developmental cognitive science is understood. Neuro-linguists have believed that the first five to seven years of a child’s life are vital to a proper development of the language faculty. And this study by Jaswal, et.al, only goes on to confirm and add new dimension to this thesis. In the experiments conducted by the research team, common objects familiar to children – such as tooth brush, toy car, key, cup, etc – are used in a way to create category confusion in their minds. For example, a pen which resembles a tooth brush, a shoe that resembles a toy car, a spoon that looks like a key, are exposed to children to challenge and contest their prior understanding of an object’s function and label. ... The results further showed that â€Å"Children made appearance-based inferences about the typical and hybrid items on 98% and 100% of trials, respectively. When E2 (experimenter no.2) later asked about the names of those items, children responded by providing labels that matched their appearances on 97% of the trials for the typical items and 100% for the hybrids. For example, children used both the typical key and the key-like object to start the car and later called both ‘‘keys,† and they used the typical spoon to eat cereal from the bowl and called it a ‘‘spoon.† (Jaswal et.al, 2009) This clearly illustrates that hybrid objects are identified as members of pre-existing categories in the mind. Even while hybrid objects carried features from two different categories, children were able to ‘convert’ them into the requisite category – namely the category that the object was designed to resemble the most. The findings of this exp eriment helps psychologists understand how memory gets formed in children. Labeling of objects and cognitive processes that go behind the labeling eventually determine the ability of children to retain and recollect labels. Hence, when children learn something that is counterintuitive, they tend to misremember this information, leading to poor recall. This has ramification for instructional designers and educational psychologists as they try and device effective ways of transferring information in the classroom. This inherent preference for conversion over compliance extends to early moral instruction received from parents and teachers too. That is, when children are taught about simple rules of right