[BLANK_AUDIO]

And can you tell us a little bit about the

work you do in your developmental lab here
in psychology?
>> Yeah, sure.
So, we work on how does the children learn
to make sense of the world around them.
And that's pretty broadly construed thing.
So how did they learn to understand how
other people behave.
How do they learn to understand the
language that they're hearing in their
community?
How do they learn to structure their own
actions,
such that they can act within that
community appropriately?
And, and how do they learn some of the,
sort of, complex
cultural inventions that we have like
Mathematics, like reading, things like
that?
And we use an array of sort of
different experimental measures for
getting at the cognitive and
social capabilities of children from
really young children,
infants, newborns, to much
older children, seven-year-olds,
ten-year-olds, adolescents.
And so that requires a whole set
of different strategies for these
different age groups.
>> So, why are experimental methods useful
as opposed
to just observing children or asking them
about different things?
>> Well, sometimes observing children can
be useful and asking children questions
could
definitely be useful and you can take that
as part of an experimental method.
So, oftentimes, it's useful for observing
children in order
to generate a novel hypothesis about a
particular result.
But if you've ever been around a bunch of
children,
>> Uh-huh.
>> You'll know that the environment is
typically pretty noisy.
And so it's really hard to make inferences
about whether one thing is actually
affecting another.
When you're just inferring behavior from
how children
are interacting around them, and that's
the multiple reasons.
It's because the data you collect is
pretty
noisy, because kids, you know, they don't
want to behave,
they want to run around, they don't
want to and they
don't want to necessarily do you want them
to do.
But it's also because when kids are in
their natural environment, they have a
whole set of structures that is supporting
their behaviour in lots of different ways.
So children might seemingly act socially
with relatively
little difficulty if they're in a play
group but
that's because that play group has been
specially designed
to try and facilitate this sort of social
interaction.
So it doesn't give us a really good idea
of exactly what
capabilities they have because that's, you
know, it's heavily scaffolds their
ability.
And of course, probably the most important
thing [LAUGH].
Sorry, the kid just knocked over the
camera.
probably, the most important thing is
that, when you're just doing
observation, it's possible to make [NOISE]
what we call robust causal inference.
>> Uh-huh.
>> So, robust causal inference is when two
as close as possible in approximation.
You know that a particular factor affects
another factor.
So for instance, you know that eating
breakfast cereal make you less hungry.
>> Uh-huh, uh-huh.
>> Something like that.
And you can, you can find that out in an
experiment, but you can't necessarily find
that out in a
formal observation because if I just
observe that you know,
you eat breakfast cereal every morning and
you get less hungry.
That's terribly confounded with a bunch of
other factors, like
say, you tend to eat breakfast cereal at 8
a.m.
or 7 a.m.,
or something like like that.
So, it could just be that around 8:15 a.m,
you just get less hungry for some
other reason, for instance, you turn on
the
TV at that time or something like that.
So experimental measures allow us to
isolate particular
factors, varying a single factor at a
time.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And thereby ensuring that it, we now
it's
only that factor that affects our, our
dependent measure.
And so this is really wonderfully useful
for
young children because their environment
otherwise is so cluttered.
>> Okay, so in terms of the life you have
here,
what kind of techniques do you use in your
experimental work?
>> We use lots.
So, one of the main issues with testing
children is they're incredibly variable.
So, a zero-month-old child or a
one-day-old child is incredibly different
from
a two-month-old child, who is incredibly
different from a nine-month-old child who
is
incredibly different from a two-year-old,
who
is incredibly different from a
four-year-old who
is so very different from a ten-year-old
and so on, and so on.
And all of these different populations
require different techniques to study
them.
And so what we try to do is develop
methods that are appropriate for
children of particular ages, and that can
be generalized to as many different ages
possible.
And so really this depends on a couple of
sort
of key capabilities that change over the
development of the child.
And probably the most important is the
development of language.
So before children know language, you
can't
really ask them to do particular tasks.
>> Right, yeah.
>> So you have to design tasks that very
much
sort of rely on the natural behaviors of
the young children.
Once children have learned language, you
can get them to
sort of do particular tasks by instructing
them to do things.
And then it all gets a little easier.
So, when kids don't know language, like I
said, you have to answer with more natural
behaviors.
And typically, that means, something that
very young babies are very,
very good at which is sitting down and
looking at things.
>> Okay.
>> So, this is something they like doing
quite a lot.
Or, or maybe they don't necessarily like
doing
it, but they don't really have much other
options.
So, we can, for example, measure whether
children are
interested in particular patterns in the
world, or particular stimuli
in the world, by measuring the degree to
which they
want to look at it or pay attention to it.
>> Okay.
>> So let me give you one example of some
work that's
currently the sort of work that we've been
doing in the lab.
so, one thing that very young babies
[NOISE] have to do when
they're learning language is figure out
the grammatical structure of that
language.
[NOISE] So, they have to figure out that,
in English
say, a typical active sentence has a
structure, subject, verb, object.
The man chases the dog.
>> Uh-huh.
>> Where as in other languages, [NOISE]
the structure might be a little bit
different.
The man where the dog chased.
>> Uh-huh.
>> Something like that.
[NOISE] And so there's this sort of
abstract structure to these languages that
children have to figure out based on the
surface content of the words.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So, we've been trying to figure out
whether even or how
it is that very young children start to
learn these structures and, and
one possibility is that [NOISE] this
ability to make generalizations that
sentences
have subject, verb, object structure,
something
that comes online quite late in
development.
>> Okay.
>> But in fact, it turns out that it's
something that kids can do very early.
[NOISE] I mean, they can do it for,
you know, a certain variety of different
structures.
So, in work we've done, we've played kids,
sets
played young babies, so seven months old,
eight-month-old babies.
Films where they see shapes associated
with particular sounds.
So they'll see, say a square, and that
square
will appear on a screen, it'll flash up on
a
screen, loom on, loom into view on a
screen,
and they'll hear a syllable associated
with it, like ba.
And then it will come again, they'll go,
hear ba, again.
And then it will come again, and they'll
hear a different sound, like goo,
something like that.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And they'll see lots of these repeating
animations where they hear different pa,
they hear the
same pattern again and again, instantiated
in the syllable,
so they'll hear ba, ba, goo, noo, noo, la.
And so forth and so forth.
So they're always hearing the same
pattern, like
A-A-B, but it's always instantiated in
different syllables.
>> Okay.
>> And what we've found, is that if you
give seven-month-old infants a couple
of minutes exposure to this sort of
pattern, they learn the, the abstraction
underneath it.
They learn that they should be hearing
things that have format A-A-B.
So what we'll do after they've listened to
this pattern for
a little while is give them some new
patterns to listen to.
>> Okay.
>> And critically, we find that when these
new patterns have the same basic
format as the previous pattern, so if'
you've been previously been hearing ga-ga
noo.
And now you hear some new syllables, also
in that A-A-B format.
>> Mm-hm.
>> They're not very interested.
They don't really want to listen to these
things for very long.
>> Uh-huh.
>> They sort of get bored and they look
away quite frequently.
But when you play them a new pattern, so,
something like ga noo noo.
So, A-B-B rather than A-A-B.
Now they get much more interested, they'll
look
at the screen for longer and so forth.
So, this suggests that kids are
abstracting patterns from really early
in development, from about seven month
olds, from about seven months.
And, and we wouldn't be able to sort of
figure these things
out without these method, methods for
implicitly measuring what kids are
interested in.
And that more or less corresponds to
figuring
out what they like to pay attention to.
>> Okay, that's great.
And how do think these kind of
methodologies will help us understand
a typical development or, you know,
psychological difficulties that children,
adolescents may face?
>> There's, I think, a huge amount to be
gained.
The exact relationship between them isn't
necessarily obvious yet, but
there's, there's a lot of interesting work
to be done.
So, we know that lots of difficulties
faced by
individuals with mental health problems
have a developmental time course.
So even the most severe mental health
problems, disorders like schizophrenia are
developmental disorders.
And they're disorders that typically arise
in adolescence.
But you can see evidence of the likelihood
of developing this sort
of disorder much earlier on in development
before the clearer symptoms are there.
So that suggests that something is going
wrong in how
these individuals interact in their
environment fairly early on in
development.
And with other disorders like autism
before a diagnosis is given,
you can typically see potential signals
earlier and earlier on in development.
So if we can develop methods that will
allow us to assess the information
processing capabilities of the, of
individuals who
are potentially at risk for these
disorders,
>> Mm-hm.
>> Very early on, then we can A,
figure out what differences in information
processing they
might compared to typically developing
individuals, and B,
we can use that as a cue for developing
techniques for
>> Intervention?
>> For in, intervening.
>> Yeah.
>> Intervening on these, intervening with
these individuals in
order to try and, and promote a different
developmental pathway.
so, so they give us, you know, two hand
holds.
One, they give us some information about
what what the information processing
problems might be,.
>> Mm-hm.
>> In these populations and two, they give
us an earlier time point
at which to intervene to try and
promote healthy development or more
typical development.
>> That's great, thank you.
>> No problem.
>> Thanks very much.