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We can also learn a lot about how infants and preschoolers learn and what they remember by measuring changes in their behaviour. In infants we are currently studying how preferences are learned, and we measure which objects they prefer to interact with. In older children, we are running studies looking at children’s ability to imagine future events and reason about future problems and preferences. In some of these studies, we give preschoolers a set of cue cards depicting a place, a person and an object, and ask them to imagine an event that could happen in the future involving those cues. The number of details that each child gave was counted to discover how we use our past experiences to imagine possible future events. In other studies, we ask children to think about a problem that they need to solve in the future and to choose between a set of objects now, that could be used to solve the problem in the future. Most recently we have been looking at how 4-year-olds think their preferences for objects will change when they are all grown up, if you would like to read more about this research you can read this blog post.
