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Articles by Jonathan Redshaw
Children Show More Selective Cognitive Offloading After First Being Compelled to Offload Indiscriminately
1 Introduction Concerns regarding human reliance on external thinking tools are hardly new. In ancient Greece, Socrates worried that if people learned to write, it would “implant forgetfulness in their souls,” as internal memory processing would be replaced by “means of external marks.” These concerns continue to be echoed in modern-day society, which is marked by unprecedented levels of opportunity for outsourcing cognitive operations.
The Role of Controllability and Foreseeability in Children's Counterfactual Emotions
The capacity to consider alternative versions of events that have already occurred is a complex form of counterfactual thinking (Beck and Riggs 2014; Epstude and Roese 2008; Kushnir 2022; Rafetseder and Perner 2012). After failing an exam, for instance, you may consider what else could have happened before or during the exam to improve your performance.
The best books to take a longer view of time
A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span.
Counterfactual choices and moral judgments in children
Abstract When making moral judgments of past actions, adults often think counterfactually about what could have been done differently. Considerable evidence suggests that counterfactual thinking emerges around age 6, but it remains unknown how this development influences children's moral judgments.
Should We Be Optimistic About the Future?
After hundreds of millennia living in small clans armed with stone tools, in the past 10,000 years humans have gone from turning silica stone into axes to turning it into computer chips. With better foresight and coordination, we have created more and more machines, artifacts, and gadgets that are all around us, some of which are even speeding into interstellar space.
Your Mind Is a Private Time Machine
The human mind is a virtual time machine. With it, we can relive past events and imagine future situations, even if we have never experienced similar situations before. Humans do this incessantly, daydreaming about summer vacations, savoring the thought of dinner dates, and brooding over test results. Because humans are mental time travelers, we can prepare for opportunities and threats well in advance, trying to shape the future to our own design.
Can Animals Plan for the Future?
Key points Some animals like dolphins can plan to some extent, but their enduring errors, even after many trials, suggest their foresight is restricted. Animals appearing to "plan ahead" may be doing so because of instinct, rather than insight. Squirrels, for instance, store nuts for the winter even if they have never experienced the approaching dark or cold.
Instinct vs. Insight: How Much Foresight Do Animals Have?
At Disney World in Florida, scientists gave two bottlenose dolphins, Bob and Toby, a series of puzzles to put their planning abilities to the test. In one task, the dolphins were first shown how to pick up weighted rings with their beak and were then taught how to drop four of these weights into a container to release a tasty fish reward.
Young children experience both regret and relief in a gain-or-loss context
ABSTRACT Recent research has provided compelling evidence that children experience the negative counterfactual emotion of regret, by manipulating the presence of a counterfactual action that would have led to participants receiving a better outcome. However, it remains unclear if children similarly experience regret’s positive counterpart, relief. The current study examined children’s negative and positive counterfactual emotions in a novel gain-or-loss context.
The Invention of Tomorrow
About the Author THOMAS SUDDENDORF is a professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Gap: The Science Of What Separates Us From Other Animals (Basic Books, 2013).
When efficiency attenuates imitation in preschool children
Brief report Frankie T. K. Fong Corresponding Author tze.fong@uqconnect.edu.au orcid.org/0000-0002-6135-1379 Early Cognitive Development Centre, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Correspondence should be addressed to Frankie T. K. Fong, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia (email: tze.fong@uqconnect.edu.au).
Developmental origins of cognitive offloading
1. Introduction What is cognition? Although prominent theorists disagree on the answer to this question [1], most traditional formulations continue to include only mental processes occurring within the physical boundaries of the individual [2]. However, these conventional perspectives are being challenged by a growing number of philosophers, biologists and psychologists who advocate for definitions of cognition to incorporate interactions between the individual and the environment [3–7].
Re-analysis of data reveals no evidence for neonatal imitation in rhesus macaques
Abstract Over the past decade, a growing number of publications have claimed to provide evidence for the existence and function of neonatal imitation in rhesus macaques. Here I show that there is in fact no empirical basis for these claims. Studies of the phenomenon have consistently failed to implement the gold standard cross-target analytical approach, which controls for increases in matching responses that may not be a function of the specific modelled behaviour.
Parents Set Visual Cues So Kids Won't Forget Instead Of Nagging
Children develop the ability to compensate for memory failures only gradually as they get older. Annie Spratt Every day, we have to remember intentions to perform specific tasks in the future. We may need to remember to buy milk on the way home from work, to return a book to the library next week, or take a certain pill at 8am every day. Psychologists call this “prospective memory”. This form of memory is notoriously fallible, accounting for 50-80% of our everyday memory problems.
How to get your kids to remember what you ask them to do
Every day, we have to remember intentions to perform specific tasks in the future. We may need to remember to buy milk on the way home from work, to return a book to the library next week, or take a certain pill at 8am every day. Psychologists call this “prospective memory”. This form of memory is notoriously fallible, accounting for 50-80% of our everyday memory problems. To compensate, we often set ourselves reminders in the form of lists or alarms. Young children can be very forgetful.
Stop nagging kids 'not to forget' – set visual cues instead | IOL Lifestyle
Every day, we have to remember intentions to perform specific tasks in the future. We may need to remember to buy milk on the way home from work, to return a book to the library next week, or take a certain pill at 8am every day. Psychologists call this “prospective memory”. This form of memory is notoriously fallible, accounting for 50-80% of our everyday memory problems. To compensate, we often set ourselves reminders in the form of lists or alarms. Young children can be very forgetful.
Parents, stop nagging kids not to forget - set visual cues instead
Every day, we have to remember intentions to perform specific tasks in the future. We may need to remember to buy milk on the way home from work, to return a book to the library next week, or take a certain pill at 8am every day. Psychologists call this “prospective memory”. This form of memory is notoriously fallible, accounting for 50-80% of our everyday memory problems. To compensate, we often set ourselves reminders in the form of lists or alarms. Young children can be very forgetful.
Preparatory responses to socially determined, mutually exclusive possibilities in chimpanzees and children
Preparatory responses to socially determined, mutually exclusive possibilities in chimpanzees and children Thomas Suddendorf, Jessica Crimston, Jonathan Redshaw Biol. Lett. 2017 13 20170170; DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0170. Published 14 June 2017
Children’s and Apes’ Preparatory Responses to Two Mutually Exclusive Possibilities
Animal brains have evolved to predict outcomes of events in the immediate environment [ 1–5 ]. Adult humans are particularly adept at dealing with environmental uncertainty, being able to mentally represent multiple, even mutually exclusive versions of the future and prepare accordingly. This capacity is fundamental to many complex future-oriented behaviors [ 6, 7 ], yet little is known about when it develops in children [ 8 ] and whether it is shared with non-human animals [ 9 ].
Comprehensive Longitudinal Study Challenges the Existence of Neonatal Imitation in Humans
FiguresFigure 1Gestures Modelled to Infants(A–H) Gestures modeled to infants in imitation testing: tongue protrusion (A), mouth opening (B), happy facial expression (C), sad facial expression (D), index finger protrusion (E), grasping (F), tube protrusion (G), and box opening (H). Not represented are the three vocal gestures: mmm, eee, and click sounds.
The best books on harnessing the power of human foresight
Named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR “How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . . She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.” —The New York Times Book Review A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future: our own, our families’, and our society’s.
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