In this study, we\u2019re interested in how children see events in the world around them at very young ages, before they\u2019ve started learning words that describe those events. In a previous study, we asked if 9-to-12-month-olds view a scene in which a girl takes a truck from a boy as involving three core participants: the girl, the truck, and the boy. We first show them a video of a girl picking up a toy truck, with a boy sitting nearby but not participating in the event. When children become familiar with the event, their attention drops. Then, we measure whether their attention is recaptured by making a slight change in the video: either the girl starts taking the truck from the boy, or the girl picks up the truck in a different way, by sliding it across the table. We found that children are more surprised by the \u201ctaking\u201d change than by the \u201csliding\u201d change, which suggests that they consider the boy a participant in the \u201ctaking\u201d event when he wasn\u2019t a participant in the \u201cpicking up\u201d event. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this current study, we\u2019re showing kids the same design with all of the videos upside-down. This makes it really hard to see these scenes as coherent events. Kids are more likely to react in differences to the physical properties of the videos, like brightness or how things are moving across the screen. So, if we don\u2019t see that children show different responses to the \u201ctaking\u201d and \u201csliding\u201d videos when they\u2019re shown upside-down, we can be more confident that these videos have similar physical properties, and that their behavior in the earlier study was because they were seeing the events as having different numbers of participants when they were played right-side-up.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In this study, we\u2019re interested in how children see events in the world around them at very young ages, before they\u2019ve started learning words that describe those events. In a previous study, we asked if 9-to-12-month-olds view a scene in which a girl takes a truck from a boy as involving three core participants: the … <\/p>\n