Don't look now... I'm trying to think

What was the name of your first headteacher? Stop and think for a while... did you just look to the heavens for the answer? During difficult cognitive activity, for example remembering information, thinking of an answer to a question, planning what we are going to say, and speaking, we often close our eyes, look up at the sky, or look away from the person we are in conversation with. Adults are very good at switching off from environmental stimulation (both live faces and other sorts of visual display) in order to concentrate better. Until recently we knew very little about whether children use gaze aversion in a similar way. This is a potentially important omission, since the efficiency with which children process information influences many aspects of their development, including school progress. In this article I'll describe what our research team at stirling has been doing to investigate children's gaze aversion, including past and current work. children's patterns of gaze promise to yield important cues to their thinking, concentration and mental processing that will be useful to paretns, teachers, psychologists and anyone engaged in assessing children's knowledge and development

The great baby signing debate

‘Baby signing’ is an augmentative communication approach that has been developed for use with hearing preverbal infants. It involves teaching babies key word signing that they can use to communicate before they can talk. A baby signing movement is currently sweeping the country. Parents of infants everywhere are reading about the benefits of teaching ‘sign’ to their children and many are embracing this wholeheartedly. Numerous companies have been set up to promote and sell baby signing materials. All claim immense benefits to be had including facilitating spoken language development, reducing tantrums and even increasing a child’s intelligence

Helping children think: Gaze aversion and teaching

Looking away from an interlocutor's face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults answer challenging arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). However, such `gaze aversion' (GA) is poorly applied by 5-year-old school children (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). In Experiment 1 we trained ten 5-year-old children to use GA while thinking about answers to questions. This trained group performed significantly better on challenging questions compared with 10 controls given no GA training. In Experiment 2 we found significant and monotonic age-related increments in spontaneous use of GA across three cohorts of ten 5-year-old school children (mean ages: 5;02, 5;06 and 5;08). Teaching and encouraging GA during challenging cognitive activity promises to be invaluable in promoting learning, particularly during early primary years

Inconsistent findings for the eyes closed effect in children: the implications for interviewing child witnesses

A child who alleges that they have been the victim of a crime will be interviewed by police officers. During a police interview it is important that the interviewer obtains the most accurate testimony possible from the child. Previous studies have shown that if children have their eyes closed during an interview they sometimes report more correct information. This paper includes two studies. In Experiment 1 156 children experienced an event and were then questioned about it. Half the children answered with their eyes open and half with their eyes closed. The participants with eyes closed provided more correct information. In Experiment 2 152 children answered questions in different conditions including eyes open and eyes closed conditions. In contrast to Experiment 1 there was no beneficial effect for the eyes closed condition. These inconsistent results are discussed with reference to actual police interviews. It is suggested that until there has been more research into eyes closed procedures caution should be taken in recommending such procedures for police interviews with children

The development of conversational and communication skills

This thesis investigates the development of children's conversational and communication skills. This is done by investigating both communicative process and outcome in two communication media: face-to-face interaction and audio-only interaction. Communicative outcome is objectively measured by assessing accuracy of performance of communication tasks. A multi-level approach to the assessment of communicative process is taken. Non-verbal aspects of process which are investigated are gaze and gesture. Verbal aspects of process range from global linguistic assessments such as length of conversational turn, to a detailed coding of utterance function according to Conversational Games analysis. The results show that children of 6 years and less do not adapt to the loss of visual signals in audio-only communication, and their performance suffers. Both the structure of children's dialogues and their use of visual signals were found to differ from that of adults. It is concluded that both verbal and non-verbal communication strategies develop into adulthood. Successful integration of these different aspects of communication is central to being an effective communicator

The great baby signing debate: academia meets public interest

‘Baby signing’ is an augmentative communication approach that has been developed for use with hearing preverbal infants. It involves teaching babies key word signing that they can use to communicate before they can talk. A baby signing movement is currently sweeping the country. Parents of infants everywhere are reading about the benefits of teaching ‘sign’ to their children and many are embracing this wholeheartedly. Numerous companies have been set up to promote and sell baby signing materials. All claim immense benefits to be had including facilitating spoken language development, reducing tantrums and even increasing a child’s intelligence

Development of gaze aversion: qualitiative changes over the early school years

Looking away from an interlocutors’ face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults and children answer challenging mental arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998; Phelps, Doherty-Sneddon & Warnock, in press). Whilst such ‘gaze aversion’ (GA) is used far less by 5-year old school children, its use increases dramatically during the first years of primary education, reaching adult levels by 8-years of age (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). The current study investigates whether developmental changes also occur in a qualitative aspect of GA - the direction of movement involved in GA shifts. Video data from 18 5-year-olds and 19 8-year-olds answering verbal and arithmetic questions were analysed for direction of GA. We found very different profiles of direction of GA across the two ages: whilst the 5-year-olds used predominantly rapid multi-directional ‘flicking’ movements and some sustained left lateral movements, the 8-year-olds used predominantly sustained rightward movements. It is concluded that, as well as quantitative increases in the use of GA across these age groups, there are concomitant qualitative changes in the nature of GA shifts. A model of human attention in face-to-face interaction is discussed as are implications for the assessment of children’s learning and development

Development of gaze aversion as disengagement from visual information

Older children, but not younger children, were found to look away more from the face of an interlocutor when answering difficult as opposed to easy questions. Similar results were found in earlier work with adults, who often avert their gaze during cognitively difficult tasks (A.M. Glenberg, J.L. Schroeder, & D.A. Robertson, 1998). Twenty-five 8-year-olds and 26 5-year-olds answered verbal reasoning and arithmetic questions of varying difficulty. The older children increased gaze aversion from the face of the adult questioner in response to both difficult verbal reasoning questions and difficult arithmetic questions. In contrast, younger children (5-year-olds) responded less consistently to cognitive difficulty. It is concluded that adultlike patterns of gaze aversion in response to cognitive difficulty are certainly acquired by 8 years of age. The implications of appropriate gaze aversion for children’s management of cognitive resources are considered

Gaze aversion during social style interactions in autism spectrum disorder and Williams syndrome

During face-to-face interactions typically developing individuals use gaze aversion (GA), away from their questioner, when thinking. GA is also used when individuals with autism (ASD) and Williams syndrome (WS) are thinking during question-answer interactions. We investigated GA strategies during face-to-face social style interactions with familiar and unfamiliar interlocutors. Participants with WS and ASD used overall typical amounts/patterns of GA with all participants looking away most while thinking and remembering (in contrast to listening and speaking). However there were a couple of specific disorder related differences: participants with WS looked away less when thinking and interacting with unfamiliar interlocutors; in typical development and WS familiarity was associated with reduced gaze aversion, however no such difference was evident in ASD. Results inform typical/atypical social and cognitive phenotypes. We conclude that gaze aversion serves some common functions in typical and atypical development in terms of managing the cognitive and social load of interactions. There are some specific idiosyncracies associated with managing familiarity in ASD and WS with elevated sociability with unfamiliar others in WS and a lack of differentiation to interlocutor familiarity in ASD. Regardless of the familiarity of the interlocutor, GA is associated with thinking for typically developing as well as atypically developing groups. Social skills training must take this into account

Gaze Aversion During Children's Transient Knowledge and Learning

Looking away from an interlocutor’s face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults and children answer challenging mental arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998; Phelps, Doherty-Sneddon, & Warnock, 2006). While such “gaze aversion” (GA) is used far less by 5-year old school children, its use increases dramatically during the first years of primary education, reaching adult levels by 8-years of age (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). Furthermore GA increases with increasing mental demands, with high levels signalling that an individual finds material being discussed challenging but remains engaged with it (Doherty-Sneddon et al., 2002; Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps, 2006). In the current study we investigate whether patterns of gaze and gaze aversion during children’s explanations can predict when they are in states of transient knowledge (Karmiloff-Smith 1992; Goldin-Meadow, Kim, & Singer, 1999). In Study 1, fifty-nine 6-year-olds took part and completed a “Time Task” along with periodic teaching intervention to improve their comprehension of telling the time. Some children improved immediately, whereas others did so more gradually. The gradual improvers showed the highest levels of GA, particularly when they were at an intermediate level of performance. In Study 2, thirty-three 6-year-old children completed a balance beam task (Pine & Messer, 2000). Children who improved the representational level of their explanations (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) of this task with training used more GA than those who did not. Practical implications for teaching and for recognizing transient knowledge states are discussed