UCD Think Lab

Back before Sophia's birthday I got an email asking if she would participate in a study at UC Davis. In late-November when I finally responded to the email. Since they need to test 300 kids, they still could use her. We made an appointment to go on Friday in the AM.

The study is titled: Eye Movements in Children's Problem Solving and Reasoning. The investigator is named Zhe Chen. Eventually I hope that it will be published so I can see what they find out. I thought it was interesting, but failed to see a practical application. Maybe the information they find will be used by someone else doing a practical study... ?

Anyways, a couple students (I'm guessing undergrads by the look of them) met with us. Sherry sat Sophia in a chair with a booster and put her in front of a fancy computer screen that tracked her eye movements as she looked at pictures. While looking at the pictures Sophia was asked analogy questions. For example, "Here is a picture of a dog and a bone. They go together. What picture goes with the horse the same way that the dog and the bone go together?" In my opinion, Sherry spoke too quickly to be talking to a three-year-old, but she was probably nervous. Sophia got less than half of them right, but they were interested in where her eyes were going. My guess is that she wasn't thinking really hard about it because she liked to pick pictures that matched (a bird with another bird, instead a nest or worm).

Then Sophia went over and played a couple card games with a guy named Dominic. He asked her to say "happy" when she saw a sad face card and "sad" when she saw a happy face card. After hearing the directions a few times, I could tell she was thinking about it because she would pause and look thoughtful every time he put a card in front of her. Not sure the point of this one.

Dominic had another card game and then a puppet game. The puppet game was my greatest source of amusement and made the entire trip worth it for me. He had two puppets: the nice dragon and the mean bear. She was supposed to follow the directions of the dragon and not follow the directions of the bear. Telling her it was a mean bear almost set her into tears and sent her running for me, because bears freak her out a bit. Anyways, once they started playing she was fine. She happily did what the dragon said (touch your nose, pat your tummy, etc.) and then when the bear talked she would tuck her chin to her chest, look really serious and say "no" in a deep voice (kind of imitating the bear). It was pretty funny.

Anyways, it was an interesting way to spend our morning and Sophia scored some bubbles for all her trouble.