Let's try it with Peeps!

It is entertaining to have a baby in the house after one has spent some time teaching courses on cognitive development, though of course two month old infants are not the most accomplished participants in life's rich pageant. Ours, for instance, has recently been devoting much of her energy to her newfound passion for eating her hands.

It's good to have a hobby.

I am sure I will be unable to resist re-enacting many classic linguistic and psychological experiments with her. They are all especially fun at the stages where they test something that hasn't quite come online yet. Why is a birthday called a birthday? Because it's the day when you get presents! (Play along at home.)

One I think I will not try, however, is the marshmallow experiment. It's just too creepily predictive. You've heard of it, I'm sure, since it's received tons of attention in the popular press. Quick version: researchers leave kids alone in a room with a marshmallow after telling them that they can eat the marshmallow now, or have two if they wait until the researcher comes back. The kids' ability to distract themselves during the waiting period, and to hold off from eating the tempting marshmallow, turned out to correlate strongly with higher SAT scores and other kinds of future success.

So, you've no doubt read about this experiment, but have you seen the video?

This is why doing child and infant research is awesome.

(You might be relieved to know that the researchers were able to make a substantial improvement in the kids' ability to wait by teaching them some simple strategies for distracting themselves.)

So, anyway, no marshmallows here. I note, instead, that it is hard to beat the giggly antics of a happy baby for sheer simpleminded pleasure. It doesn't offer much in the way of sophistication or intellectual nuance, but I like it. Also it has now been amply demonstrated, over many trials, that I am a person who says "Who's a nice baby then? YOU ARE! YOU ARE!" 

You are!

Comments

[Cecily]

My unending battles with my stupid institution's stupid institutional review board have made me hypersensitive to the subject- but I am very curious to know if the original permissions here included a release for uploading the videos to YouTube. They probably did. They probably didn't even have a problem getting that permission. Probably every other IRB in the world will sign off on anything, and makes it very easy to do research and publish the research and allow other people to look at the research. I am so sorely used.

[Ray Davis]

A friend of ours is a professional linguist, which has made her motherhood more entertaining for us as well as for her (and presumably her young 'uns).

[LizardBreath]

Oooh, rainbow-shirt boy made it! I was rooting for him.

[Carin]

Rainbow-shirt boy is enormously sympathetic, but I have to say I rather admire the little ginger girl who has it halfway down her gullet while the researcher is still in the room.

[Betty M]

I hadn't seen that before - just great. I was fond of the fidgety twins.