I don't feel as bad about being an Idiot Savant now, although I'm not
sure this study is correctly described by the headline. It appears to be
the infant' ability to peceive and analyze complex deviations.
But I just couldn't resist a juicy headline like that... and in the same
newsletter, another article points to a solution:
In contrast to claims that children are being overmedicated for
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a team of researchers
at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that
a high percentage of kids with ADHD are not receiving treatment. In
fact, almost half of the children who might benefit from ADHD drugs were
not getting them.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/522565/?sc=dwhn
Drug the RugRats!
Source: University of Oregon
Released: Fri 04-Aug-2006, 16:30 ET
Embargo expired: Mon 07-Aug-2006, 17:00 ET
Infants, as Early as 6 Months, Do See Errors in Arithmetic
http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/522511/
Newswise — Using advanced brain sensor technology developed at the
University of Oregon, researchers have confirmed often-debated findings
from 1992 that showed infants as young as six months know when an
arithmetic solution is wrong.
Andrea Berger and Gabriel Tzur, both at Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev in Israel, conducted new tests with 24 infants (14 males and 10
females) between six and nine months of age. The infants were shown one
or two dolls in a videotaped puppet theater. Their view was then blocked
briefly and the number of dolls was left unchanged, or one was added or
removed. As in the earlier research, the infants looked longer when the
screen was removed and the number of dolls differed from the previous
exposure.
In this new case, however, the infants wore special brain-monitoring
netting manufactured by Electrical Geodesic Inc., a University of Oregon
spin-off company. The 128-electrode netting allowed for much more
extensive brain-wave monitoring than was available previously.
The data was analyzed at the University of Oregon. The mean time for
infants who saw the same number of dolls before and after was 6.94
seconds. They held their gaze longer (8.04 seconds) when the number of
dolls differed. The time of measurement ended when a child looked away
from the display.
The findings were published this week online ahead of publication in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They provide clarity to
the scientific debate that surfaced soon after Karen Wynn, a Yale
University psychologist, first published her results in Nature (Dec. 31,
1992), said Michael I. Posner, a professor of psychology at the
University of Oregon.
“The research tends to confirm that the varying looking times of the
infants are due to a deviation in their expectations,” Posner said. “It
also shows that the same anatomy exists in infants as in adults.” The
latter point, he said, goes against the idea that basic changes in brain
anatomy occur between infancy and adulthood.
“A bigger consequence for us,” he said, “is that the origin of the
executive attention system must go back to infancy.” Research previously
had indicated that this system, which is related to decision-making and
task switching, does not develop until a child is 2.5 years of age.
The presence of an executive-control system in 6-month-old infants was a
surprise, Posner said. While infants are not yet able to regulate their
behavior when detecting their own errors, the researchers wrote, “Our
data indicate that the basic brain circuitry involved in the detection
of errors is already functional before the end of the first year of life.”
The approach for the research was the brainchild of Berger, who had been
a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon before moving to
Ben-Gurion University. Berger, Tzur and Posner were co-authors of the paper.
The research was funded by a joint United States-Israel Binational
Science Foundation grant.
Links: To see a video of a child in the study, see:
http://waddle.uoregon.edu/media/InfantEyes.mp4
