The authors showed 48 preschoolers, half of them boys and half girls, a videotape of two women, four cups, and a ball. In each of four sequences, one woman said she was going to hide the ball under one of the cups. The other woman covered her eyes and turned to the wall. The \u201chider\u201d placed a barrier in front of the cups, so the children could see she was hiding the ball, but not which cup she hid it under. The barrier was removed, the other woman turned around. Then, each sequence took one of three forms. In the \u201cbaseline\u201d condition, both women sat with their hands in their laps. In another condition, each grasped a different cup. And in another, each pointed at a different cup. The children were asked: \u201cWhich woman knows where the ball is?\u201d In two of the trials, one woman was the hider; in the other two, the other was.<\/p>\n When both grasped the cup or when neither touched a cup, the children gave the correct answer about three times out of four. Grasping was not a meaningful gesture to the children, the authors guessed, or they may have associated grasping with searching for the ball. When both women pointed, however, the children chose the right person only about half the time\u2014statistically, by chance.<\/p>\n To make sure the preschoolers hadn\u2019t ignored the question and inferred they were being asked which cup they would look under, the experimenters showed eight other children the pointing sequences and asked: \u201cWhich woman hid the ball?\u201d In this case, the children got it right three out of four times. So the first group knew who hid the ball; they just thought the other woman must also have had some intelligence about the ball\u2019s whereabouts.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom an early age, when children see pointing, they understand it as an important gesture used in contexts of teaching and learning<\/strong>,\u201d Palmquist explains. \u201cGenerally people point because they have good reason to do it.\u201d\u00a0 As a species humans are \u201cuniquely inclined toward cooperative communication,\u201d she notes. \u201cThis finding fits into that framework. The children are already expecting that people will be helpful and knowledgeable, especially since they\u2019re using these cues<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: If you want a preschooler to get the point, point. That\u2019s a lesson that can be drawn from a new study in… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[45,13,160,74,73,19,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1686,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions\/1686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/BabywithPuppets.jpg\" "\\"gestures\\"")
If you want a preschooler to get the point, point<\/strong>. That\u2019s a lesson that can be drawn from a new study in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. \u00a0As part of their investigation of how small children know what other people know, the authors, Carolyn Palmquist and Vikram K. Jaswal of the University of Virginia, found they were able to mislead preschoolers with the simple introduction of a pointing gesture.\u00a0 \u201cChildren were willing to attribute knowledge to a person solely based on the gesture they used to convey the information<\/strong>,\u201d says Palmquist. \u201cThey have built up such a strong belief in the knowledge that comes along with pointing that it trumps everything else, including what they see with their eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n