David M. Sobel, Ph.D. - US grants

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from Applicant's Abstract): While it is well documented that children with autism are impaired in their language development, research on their categorization has shown little to no impairment. However, such research has focused only on children's categorization using perceptual features of objects and not considered what role causality plays in conceptual development. This project seeks to examine conceptual and language development in both normal children and children with autism, focusing on their causal understanding of the world. Furthermore, conceptual development has usually been related to aspects of language development. It is possible that understanding categorization using causal features of objects is related linguistically to providing causal explanations about the world. Children between the ages of 24 months and 6 years will be given categorization tasks that use causal and perceptual cues. They will also be given narrative tasks, designed to elicit explanations about the world. Children with autism of certain ages will also be tested. In this way, we can discover if the linguistic and conceptual developments are linked and what role they might play in diagnosis and treatment.

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from Applicant's Abstract): While it is well documented that children with autism are impaired in their language development, research on their categorization has shown little to no impairment. However, such research has focused only on children's categorization using perceptual features of objects and not considered what role causality plays in conceptual development. This project seeks to examine conceptual and language development in both normal children and children with autism, focusing on their causal understanding of the world. Furthermore, conceptual development has usually been related to aspects of language development. It is possible that understanding categorization using causal features of objects is related linguistically to providing causal explanations about the world. Children between the ages of 24 months and 6 years will be given categorization tasks that use causal and perceptual cues. They will also be given narrative tasks, designed to elicit explanations about the world. Children with autism of certain ages will also be tested. In this way, we can discover if the linguistic and conceptual developments are linked and what role they might play in diagnosis and treatment.

The world is full of causal knowledge that children must discover. While there is little doubt that children learn physical, psychological, and biological knowledge at an amazing capacity, there is only a modest understanding of how children represent this causal knowledge or learn new causal relations. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. David Sobel examines the idea that a particular computational framework serves as a model for representing and learning causal knowledge. Preliminary investigations for this study have demonstrated that preschoolers engage in causal inferences according to the premises of this model. Dr. Sobel seeks to extend these findings to toddlers and infants. This would demonstrate that children possess sophisticated causal reasoning abilities from very early ages and would map out a description of how children represent their causal knowledge. Dr. Sobel also suggests a particular algorithm that describes how causal learning takes place. He will investigate children's use of this algorithm when learning both physical and psychological knowledge. This would demonstrate why particular developmental differences in causal learning abilities are present during the infant and preschool years.

Much recent research and contemporary thinking suggests that children take an active role in constructing knowledge of their environment. Exactly how children do this is still a mystery. Understanding how children represent and learn causal knowledge should enable researchers to determine how to promote such learning. This would allow us to design better interventions for education, particularly for science education. Understanding how environmental factors contribute to causal learning would shed insight into how negative factors could be reduced. This could prevent children from becoming at-risk learners early in life. Finally, many developmental disorders have been diagnosed by citing that children lack particular causal reasoning abilities (such as psychological knowledge in the case of autism). Understanding how children acquire such causal knowledge might enable us to determine why children with autism (and other at-risk populations) do not acquire such cognitive abilities.

In order to successfully communicate, speakers and hearers must use more than their knowledge of a common language. Often, understanding a speaker's intended meaning requires "reading between the lines" thereby enriching the linguistic meaning of what the speaker has said. For example, if a speaker says "I like some of my relatives," the hearer will likely understand her to have implied that she does not like all of them, even though her utterance is, strictly speaking, true if she does in fact like them. Previous work has shown that similarly enriched meanings can be computed extremely rapidly by hearers. This project examines in detail how speakers (or readers) arrive at such enriched meanings. What kinds of expectations about the speaker's choice of linguistic expressions does the hearer rely on? Does the hearer take into account the speaker's communicative goal or communicative abilities? Are there individual differences in the extent to which people can integrate more socially-based expectations about typical communicative behavior with linguistic meanings? And are there aspects of linguistic structure or context that make enriched meanings more accessible to the hearer/reader?

This project will address some currently heated debates in theoretical linguistics, philosophy and cognitive psychology about the nature of enriched meanings and their relationship to purely linguistic meanings. It will provide the first study of individual differences in this domain, laying the groundwork for future studies with atypical populations (especially autistic individuals). The results are also likely of interest to computational linguists.

This project, a collaboration between Brown University and Providence Children's Museum (PCM) focuses on investigating children's developing social cognition, particularly about how and why knowledge mediates the development of diagnostic reasoning. The research team will explore tools for use by informal science institutions like children's museums, science centers, and zoos. These tools may be used to support children's metacognition around diagnostic reasoning and causal learning as well as more broadly along with caregivers' understanding of their children's learning processes in informal science education (ISE) settings. Deliverables include: (a) a workshop and research manual for museum professionals; (b) a blog; (c) a cross-discipline literature review on metacognition and making learning visible; (d) reports from focus groups and interviews with caregivers and children at PCM focused on learning and play in the museum context; (e) a range of tools designed to help children and their caregivers become aware of their metacognitive processes; (f) exhibit labels and other communication tools for visitors to the museum; and (g) a permanent Mind Lab space at PCM that will be used to communicate the work of the partnership and research to the public. These deliverables will inform the development of a model of practice that ISE professionals can employ when working with children and their caregivers with the goal of making their learning and learning processes visible.

This research project will advance the field by building theoretical understanding around children's reasoning and scientific thinking. It will also build capacity among academic researchers and informal science education researchers, educators, and administrators by providing empirical support for pedagogical decisions and strategies employed on a daily basis.

In order to improve science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) learning, it is crucial to better understand the informal experiences that young children have that prepare them for formal science education. Young children are naturally curious about the world around them, and research in developmental psychology shows that families often support children in exploring and seeking explanations for scientific phenomena. It is less clear how to link children's natural curiosity and everyday parent-child interaction with more formal STEM learning. This collaborative project will team researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Texas, and Brown University with informal learning practitioners at the Children's Discovery Museum, The Thinkery, and the Providence Children's Museum in order to investigate how family interaction relates to children's causal learning, as well as how modifications to museum exhibit design and facilitation by museum staff influence families' styles of interaction and increase children's causal learning. This project is funded by the Research on Education and Learning (REAL) program which supports fundamental research by investigators from a range of disciplines in order to deepen what is known about STEM learning.

The project team will examine how ethnically and linguistically diverse samples of parents and children engage in collaborative scientific learning in three children's museums across the U.S. The research will combine observational studies of parent-child interaction in a real-world setting with experimental measures of children's causal learning. The investigators will examine how children explore and derive explanations for museum exhibits about mechanical gear function and fluid dynamics. In this way, the researchers will investigate the relation between styles of parent-child interaction and children's causal learning. The team will also investigate novel ways of presenting material within the exhibits to facilitate exploration and explanation. They will explore how signage, conversations with museum staff, parents' attitudes towards learning in museum settings, and parents' own prior knowledge about the exhibits can influence the parent-child interaction and subsequent causal learning. The project will advance the basic research goal of advancing what is known about what affects children's science content learning. It will also advance the practice-oriented goal of developing new strategies for the design of science museum exhibits and make recommendations for how parents can better talk to their children about scientific phenomena.

One of the most important processes in scientific thinking is belief revision: the ability to change an initial hypothesis in light of new evidence. In order to do this, children must be able to do two things. First, they must be able to reason about how the world works so that they can understand the causal systems they encounter, such as what causes earthquakes. Second, children must be able to think about their own knowledge and the process of learning so that they will know whether and how to change their beliefs about causal systems. This project seeks to (1) discover how the capacity for belief revision develops in the early elementary-school years, (2) explore how this capacity relates to children's awareness of their own learning, and (3) describe how both of these processes relate to children's interactions with museum exhibits. The research team involves developmental laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University and informal STEM learning partners at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Providence Children's Museum. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program which funds fundamental research that seeks to understand, build theory to explain, and suggest interventions (and innovations) to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation.

The project involves two lines of research, which study children's responses to different kinds of science puzzles. The first series of experiments are lab-based and vary the information that children observe and the types of exploratory actions that they can take. Children are also interviewed to find out how they think about science and learning. This design is intended to determine how different sets of evidence and different exploratory actions affect children's learning. It also addresses how children's abilities for belief revision may differ between abstract and contextualized causal systems. This line of work additionally investigates when children gain the capacity to revise their beliefs explicitly in the face of counterevidence, linking their scientific thinking capacities to their developing metacognitive abilities. The second series of experiments observes and records children's explorations of and interactions in museum exhibits. Parents and children are interviewed and asked to comment on video clips of their museum explorations. This allows the researchers to examine how naturally occurring behavior in informal learning settings affects children's learning and views about learning. Findings can illuminate how children learn to integrate evidence with their beliefs, which can inform educational policies and practices around the teaching of science. These studies can also advance researchers and museum practitioners' understanding of how museum environments foster children's growth into healthy, independent thinkers and how to support caregivers' efforts to assist children's learning.

This project will investigate the role of distinct mechanisms for inhibition on children's developing social cognition, specifically focused on their understanding of others' mental states, their trust in others' knowledge, and their understanding of fairness. In addition to enhancing knowledge about how specific mechanisms of inhibition develop, the project will address long-standing debates in social cognition regarding the role of inhibition in development. Isolating the role of different inhibitory processes in children's social judgment specifies the mechanisms through which children develop social cognitive knowledge, and cognitive development more generally. Understanding how these processes unfold also applies to real-world practice. By examining how children understand others' mental states, the researchers will be able to provide a framework for describing how children resolve conflicts with others. By examining how children develop concepts of fairness, the researchers will be able to identify factors contributing to cooperation and moral development. These findings have the potential to impact curriculum design and interventions designed to promote social cognitive development.

This project uses a technique called reach trajectory tracking (RTT), which measures how children engage in reaching behaviors in response to scenes shown to them on a screen. Different mechanisms of inhibitory control are reflected by the speed and trajectory of children's reaching responses. Three lines of research in social cognition will be addressed: children's theory of mind, selective social learning, and prosocial behavior. Each line of research targets the developmental trajectory of a social-cognitive process and discerns the role of distinct inhibitory processes in that development. In this way, the research team can articulate ways in which children's social cognition develops and what role inhibition plays in this development.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This RAPID project will study connections between children's hygiene habits and learning about science, such as the science of disease transmission. It builds upon findings from the investigator?s prior research of parent-child interactions observed in children?s museums and will extend this research to home settings. This research will focus on understanding how goal-setting, whether it is parent-directed, child-directed, or jointly-directed, affects children?s engagement with a handwashing activity and their subsequent learning about handwashing behavior and preventing the spread of disease. More specifically, the intent is to examine how goal-setting during an interactive demonstration between parents and children relates to children?s recollection of the activity and their handwashing behavior afterwards. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.

During a pandemic, it is vital that children establish good hygiene habits and understand the importance of handwashing for the prevention of disease transmission. What is most important is that young children wash their hands frequently and follow good hygiene habits, such as using soap, when doing so. This study examines the role parents might play in engaging children to wash their hands. The project team has developed a short 10 minute intervention that parents and children can participate in while using everyday household items. Utilizing remote technology, parents and children will be guided through this intervention while video recording their behavior. Families will be presented with a structured activity for parents and children to participate in together. This activity will be focused on how handwashing, and particularly the use of soap during handwashing, helps prevent the spread of germs. Parent-child interactions will be coded using schemes for goal setting that the investigator developed in prior work. Directly after their participation and one week later, children will be asked to reflect on the activity to understand what they remember about it, and to understand whether they have encoded the importance of handwashing for preventing the transmission of disease. Parents will also be asked to track their children?s handwashing to see whether aspects of these reflections, as well as individual differences in how parents and children interact during the activity, promote better engagement with handwashing. The data generated will allow researchers to develop best practices for interventions centered on children?s handwashing and the prevention of disease transmission. Knowing such practices is critical for reintegrating children into social settings such as schools and children's museums.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.