Block Towers Research Articles

Unconscious intuitive physics: Prioritized breakthrough into visual awareness for physically unstable block towers

Unconscious intuitive physics: Prioritized breakthrough into visual awareness for physically unstable block towers

Generalizing actions with the subtraction-compensation property: primary students’ algebraic thinking with tasks involving vertical towers of blocks

An important approach for developing children’s algebraic thinking involves introducing them to generalized arithmetic at the time they are learning arithmetic. Our aim in this study was to investigate children’s attention to and expression of generality with the subtraction-compensation property, as evidence of a type of algebraic thinking known as relational thinking. The tasks involved subtraction modelled as difference and comparing the heights of towers of blocks. In an exploratory qualitative study, 22 middle primary (9–11-year-old) students from two schools participated in individual videoed interviews. The tasks were designed using theoretical perspectives on embodied visualization and concreteness fading to provide multiple opportunities for the students to make sense of subtraction as difference and to advance their relational thinking. Twelve out of 22 students evidenced conceptual understanding of the comparison model of subtraction (subtraction as difference) and expression of the compensation property of equality. Four of these students repeatedly evidenced relational thinking for true/false tasks and open equivalence tasks. A proposed framework for levels of attention to/expression of generality with the subtraction-compensation property is shared and suggestions for further research are presented.

Consistency and Variation in Reasoning About Physical Assembly.

The ability to reason about how things were made is a pervasive aspect of how humans make sense of physical objects. Such reasoning is useful for a range of everyday tasks, from assembling a piece of furniture to making a sandwich and knitting a sweater. What enables people to reason in this way even about novel objects, and how do people draw upon prior experience with an object to continually refine their understanding of how to create it? To explore these questions, we developed a virtual task environment to investigate how people come up with step-by-step procedures for recreating block towers whose composition was not readily apparent, and analyzed how the procedures they used to build them changed across repeated attempts. Specifically, participants (N = 105) viewed 2D silhouettes of eight unique block towers in a virtual environment simulating rigid-body physics, and aimed to reconstruct each one in less than 60 s. We found that people built each tower more accurately and quickly across repeated attempts, and that this improvement reflected both group-level convergence upon a tiny fraction of all possible viable procedures, as well as error-dependent updating across successive attempts by the same individual. Taken together, our study presents a scalable approach to measuring consistency and variation in how people infer solutions to physical assemblyproblems.

Perceiving precarity (beyond instability) in block towers

Perceiving precarity (beyond instability) in block towers

Early prosociality is conditional on opportunity cost and familiarity with the target

Developmental research in the past decade has painted the picture of a gregarious child ready to engage in a range of prosocial behavior, but less is known about the situational factors that moderate this behavior. The present study investigated the effects of cost and familiarity on children's readiness to help the victim of a moral transgression. Opportunity cost was operationalized as the time and effort expended on providing help, that could otherwise be used to earn a reward from a productive task. Familiarity varied as a function of whether there was prior contact between the child and victim. Five- and six-year-olds in Singapore ( N = 120) witnessed an adult transgressor destroy the victim's tower of blocks, responded to the victim's pleas for help in rebuilding her tower, and shared resources with both actresses. Contrary to our initial predictions, children helped a familiar victim less when cost was high as opposed to low, but helped an unfamiliar victim equally regardless of cost. Additionally, helping rates were low (30–60%) except in the least prohibitive condition (> 80%; Low-Cost, Familiar Victim), stemming from a combination of not having a productive task to occupy one's time and energy, and simultaneously a familiar target which increased one's intrinsic motivation to help. The conditional limits imposed on children's decision to help thus appear to be, “I'll help, if I know you and have nothing better to do!” In terms of resource sharing, children behaved selfishly toward both the victim and transgressor regardless of their familiarity with the victim. Altogether, our findings suggest that children consider self-interest when deciding whether to help and share with others.

A dedicated mental resource for intuitive physics

In daily life, we continually evaluate the physical structure of our environments to plan our decisions and actions – e.g., packing a grocery bag in a way that will not crush the items at the bottom or building a sandcastle that does not topple. The physical scenarios that we regularly encounter can vary dramatically in their contents, yet we can intuitively understand their underlying physical structure and predict their future behavior. How? We might draw on domain-general mental resources to reason about physical behavior in an ad-hoc fashion, but an intriguing alternative is that we possess a dedicated set of mental resources for physical inference, allowing us to flexibly apply the principles of classical mechanics to any scene we encounter. Here, we tested for a dedicated mental resource for intuitive physics by evaluating individual differences in performance on a battery of intuitive physics tasks. We presented participants with five tasks, spanning a broad range of physical scenarios: 1) stability judgments of block towers; 2) trajectory predictions for bouncing pucks; 3) mass inferences from observed collisions; 4) predictions of collision outcomes based on objects’ masses, velocities, and geometry; and 5) mass inferences from observation of people’s interactions with the objects of interest. A factor analysis revealed that this collection of tasks draws on a common underlying mental resource that is distinct from other facets of cognition such as spatial reasoning and working memory. Further, we found that a reduced task battery (lasting ~15 minutes) captured ~90% of the reliable variance of the full battery, providing a measure that can be efficiently applied in a variety of contexts to evaluate intuitive physics abilities (e.g., in clinical populations, in longitudinal studies, or in training studies). Our findings point to a specialized mental resource for intuitive physics that is distinct from other cognitive domains.

Focus on One or More? Cultural Similarities and Differences in How Parents Talk About Social Events to Preschool Children.

How parents talk about social events shapes their children’s understanding of the social world and themselves. In this study, we show that parents in a society that more strongly values individualism (the United States) and one that more strongly values collectivism (Japan) differ in how they talk about negative social events, but not positive ones. An animal puppet show presented positive social events (e.g., giving a gift) and negative social events (e.g., knocking over another puppet’s block tower). All shows contained two puppets, an actor and a recipient of the event. We asked parents to talk to their 3- and 4-years old children about these events. A total of 26 parent–child dyads from the United States (M = 41.92 months) and Japan (M = 42.77 months) participated. The principal dependent measure was how much parent talk referred to the actor of each type of social event. There were no cultural differences observed in positive events – both the United States and Japanese parents discussed actors more than recipients. However, there were cultural differences observed in negative events – the United States parents talked mostly about the actor but Japanese parents talked equally about the actor and the recipient of the event. The potential influences of these differences on early cognitive and social development are discussed.

Theory of Mind and children’s comforting behaviour (La Teoría de la Mente y el comportamiento infantil de consuelo)

ABSTRACT In order to comfort others, children need to exhibit Theory of Mind (ToM) skills. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of ToM in association with children’s spontaneous comforting behaviour in a laboratory task. Forty-seven children between 26 and 57 months of age completed three ToM tasks: diverse desires, diverse beliefs and belief-emotion. To evaluate comforting, we used a previously evaluated procedure in which an experimenter drops a tower of blocks and pretends to be upset. The results showed a significant positive relationship between children’s understanding of their own and others’ desires and comforting. However, no relationships were found between comforting and understanding of one’s own and others’ beliefs or belief-emotion. The relationship between the different ToM tasks and age was also assessed, but it was non-significant. The implications of these findings for understanding the onset of spontaneous prosocial behaviour are discussed.

Reconstructing physical representations of block towers in visual working memory

Reconstructing physical representations of block towers in visual working memory

Fine-Grained Activity Recognition for Assembly Videos

In this letter we address the task of recognizing assembly actions as a structure (e.g. a piece of furniture or a toy block tower) is built up from a set of primitive objects. Recognizing the full range of assembly actions requires perception at a level of spatial detail that has not been attempted in the action recognition literature to date. We extend the fine-grained activity recognition setting to address the task of assembly action recognition in its full generality by unifying assembly actions and kinematic structures within a single framework. We use this framework to develop a general method for recognizing assembly actions from observation sequences, along with observation features that take advantage of a spatial assembly's special structure. Finally, we evaluate our method empirically on two application-driven data sources: 1) An IKEA furniture-assembly dataset, and 2) A block-building dataset. On the first, our system recognizes assembly actions with an average framewise accuracy of 70% and an average normalized edit distance of 10%. On the second, which requires fine-grained geometric reasoning to distinguish between assemblies, our system attains an average normalized edit distance of 23%-a relative improvement of 69% over prior work.

The Rabbit Listened by C. Doerrfeld

Doerrfeld, Cori. The Rabbit Listened. Dial-Penguin Random House, 2018.
 This picture book, both written and illustrated by Cori Doerrfeld, is a lovely book for encouraging listening skills and overall calm in children aged 1-5. As the implicit meaning can run very deep, adults would also benefit from the messaging. It is about a young girl, a toddler named Taylor, who is grieving. At the beginning of the story, Taylor is in her comfy pyjamas and has just finished building a substantial wooden block tower. It then comes crashing down, providing a strong, simple, and non-threatening metaphor to the adversities of everyday life.
 As a result, Taylor is very sad and would like to express her feelings in a certain way, yet she is unsure of what way that is or is unable to articulate her emotion. Several different types of animals come by to try to cheer her up. A chicken tries to get her to talk (and will not be quiet), a bear tries to get her to shout (displaying anger), etc. The variety of animals chosen is wonderful symbolism that kids can relate to and are a great visual metaphor for feelings. At the end of the story, Taylor realizes she just wants to be alone and be quiet. The rabbit was the only animal to recognize this. The rabbit just listened.
 The story includes soft, calm, and simple crayon-type illustrations that are so cute, they are almost tactile. The background of each page is stark white, placing the focus of the story solely on the characters. This book would appeal to just about anyone reflecting on their feelings during a time of loss, difficulty, or even trauma. As some of the less obvious metaphors would be lost on a younger audience, this book is a great stepping stone to begin and facilitate conversations between children and adults about feelings and how to cope with challenging life circumstances.
 Highly recommended: 4 out of 5 starsReviewer: Rachel Radmanovich

Why do women leave surgical training? A qualitative and feminist study

Women are under-represented in surgery and leave training in higher proportions than men. Studies in this area are without a feminist lens and predominantly use quantitative methods not well suited to the complexity of the problem. In this qualitative study, a researcher interviewed women who had chosen to leave surgical training. Women were recruited using a purposive snowball strategy through the routine communications of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Trainee Association over a 3-week period, and were interviewed over the following 4 months in the past 4 years in person or by telephone. More specific details are available on request from the authors. Supported by male and female co-researchers, and in dialogue with study participants, she then coded the findings and defined themes. An explanatory model was developed by integrating findings with different theories and previous literature. The research team developed three aspects of the model into a visual analogue. 12 women participated in the study, with all Australian states and territories, and New Zealand, as well as five medical specialty streams, represented. The time spent in training ranged from 6 months to 4 years, and all participants, except two, had trained in both metropolitan and rural locations. The findings confirmed factors identified in earlier reports as reasons women leave surgical training, and contributed six new factors: unavailability of leave, a distinction between valid and invalid reasons for leave, poor mental health, absence of interactions with the women in surgery section of their professional body and other supports, fear of repercussion, and lack of pathways for independent and specific support. The relationships between factors was complex and sometimes paradoxical. The visual analogue is a tower of blocks, with each block representing a factor that contributed to the decision to leave surgical training, and with the toppling of the tower representing the choice to leave. The visual analogue indicates that effective action requires attention to the contributory factors, the small actions that can topple the tower, and the contexts in which the blocks are stacked. Women might be best helped by interventions that are alert to the possibility of unplanned negative effects, do not unduly focus on gender, and address multiple factors. This should inform interventions in surgical training, with attention to local social context, health-care setting, and training programme structure. Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Ian and Ruth Gough Surgical Education Scholarship.

Why AIs are chasing chickens in Minecraft: The path to a generally intelligent AI might run through this virtual universe - [News

If artificial intelligence (AI) agents are to become real players in society, using their machine abilities to complement our human strengths, they must first become players in the video game of Minecraft. And to prove themselves in Minecraft, they must work together to capture animals in a maze, build towers of blocks, and hunt for treasure while fighting off skeletons.

Object Use in Children with Autism: Building with Blocks from a Piagetian Perspective

Aim: This study focused on the manipulation of objects by children with suspected autism spectrum disorder. The aim was to demonstrate how objects can be seen as active agents of interpersonal exchange in face-to-face interactions. Participants: Three children with suspected autism spectrum disorder (aged 18, 20, and 24 months) were selected as representative of the sensorimotor stage of development. Methods: Starting from Piaget’s classical approach to the sensorimotor and symbolic developmental stages, the study moved towarda socio-material interpretation in which some patterns of interaction involving object manipulation seem to create a space that supports adult-child communication. In videotaped observations of verbal and non-verbal signs during an (organized) free play session, each child manipulated seven small blocks of colored plastic in the presence of an adult. The observations were informed by a checklist of 14 items, including eye contact and building a tower of toy blocks (from section B of the CHAT (CHecklist for Autism in Toddlers) instrument. Results: Based on a broad Piagetian perspective and recent work in the field of socio-materiality, key observations included the following: 1) sensorimotor and realistic play was observed in all three children; 2) there were some intriguing indications that objects serve as concrete mediators in the intersubjective space between adult and child; 3) some of the children’s attention patterns were visibly mediated by the object. Discussion and conclusions: All three children exhibited a particular sequence of actions. First, they manipulated the blocks through active experimentation; second, there was an apparent pause, during which the children were in fact examining the blocks to determine how best to continue the interaction; and finally, the children monitored adult attention by means of eye contact or by restarting manipulation of the blocks. As this last step in the sequence indicated that the object became a mediator of reciprocal attention, this interpersonal process was labeled “attention mediated by object.”

Social Models Enhance Apes\u2019 Memory for Novel Events

Nonhuman primates are more likely to learn from the actions of a social model than a non-social “ghost display”, however the mechanism underlying this effect is still unknown. One possibility is that live models are more engaging, drawing increased attention to social stimuli. However, recent research with humans has suggested that live models fundamentally alter memory, not low-level attention. In the current study, we developed a novel eye-tracking paradigm to disentangle the influence of social context on attention and memory in apes. Tested in two conditions, zoo-housed apes (2 gorillas, 5 chimpanzees) were familiarized to videos of a human hand (social condition) and mechanical claw (non-social condition) constructing a three-block tower. During the memory test, subjects viewed side-by-side pictures of the previously-constructed block tower and a novel block tower. In accordance with looking-time paradigms, increased looking time to the novel block tower was used to measure event memory. Apes evidenced memory for the event featuring a social model, though not for the non-social condition. This effect was not dependent on attention differences to the videos. These findings provide the first evidence that, like humans, social stimuli increase nonhuman primates’ event memory, which may aid in information transmission via social learning.

Amanda Panda Quits Kindergarten by Candice Ransom, and: The Big Bad Fox by Benjamin Renner

Reviewed by: Amanda Panda Quits Kindergarten by Candice Ransom, and: The Big Bad Fox by Benjamin Renner Sarah Sahn Ransom, Candice Amanda Panda Quits Kindergarten; illus. by Christine Grove.Doubleday, 2017[26p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-399-55456-8 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-399-55455-1 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4–6 yrs Amanda Panda knows exactly how kindergarten will go: she’s going to write her name on the board in the biggest letters, build the tallest block tower, and run the fastest, just like her big brother did. When she actually gets there, though, she’s overshadowed at every turn by pink-clad Bitsy (“My favorite color is sparkles!”), who not only gets all the attention but also seems intent on being Amanda’s new best friend. Amanda quits kindergarten and joins her brother’s second-grade class only to find second grade isn’t so great, but then helping a lost Bitsy leads her back to kindergarten and an appreciation for its possibilities. The theme of expectations not living up to reality is treated gently, and with her situational shock and evasive maneuver, Amanda is a sympathetic heroine. In the soft, uncluttered line and watercolor illustrations, the linework has a delicate precision that adds character; tomboy Amanda’s annoyed and dismayed facial expressions contrast humorously with Bitsy’s earnest friendliness, and the kindergarten classroom populated with roly poly panda children is warm and welcoming. The lesson makes an impact without preaching, and kids are likely to want to revisit this one, especially as the first day of school approaches. [End Page 467] Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Tattoo 2082

Tattoo 2082 Mary Helen Stefaniak (bio) Like the internal combustion engine, repurposing South Florida seemed like a good idea at the time. Everybody knew that old folks liked the weather down there, and many of the existing luxury towers with their great ocean views had been built to survive hurricanes and storm surges. They were well suited to rising waters, their AC and electricals strategically installed. Key West had already gone under in 2043 (all but the hilltop cemetery), its submersion followed for many years by apocryphal sightings of web-toed cats. By mid-century, when long stretches of the Florida coast were underwater, investors posed the question: Why not sell that melting real estate to those who wouldn’t need it for long? And so it was that friends and fellow residents Kyla, Caitlin, Jared, and Drew were playing a game of bridge one morning, girls against boys, in the newly remodeled canteen/solarium at Aventura Assisted-Living Condominiums and Resort (formerly Miami Lifestyle Condos) when an automated laser nurse floated through the room at just below hip level. Using technology developed in the early 21st century for eradicating mosquitoes, one male at a time, the AutoNurse laser-targeted each of the oldsters in turn, dispensed the right dosage of the right drugs, and then floated noiselessly into the breezeway beyond. Jared fanned his cards with gnarled fingers and remarked, “I hate that robot bitch.” Drew, a former Rhodes scholar and author of several well-received volumes whose subjects he could sometimes recall, pointed out that the AutoNurse was not, in the strictest sense of the word, a robot. [End Page 167] “Actually,” said Kyla, a former National Science fellow, “it is.” “Well, it’s certainly not a bitch,” Caitlin put in, laying her cards on the table. The four of them found it amusing to think that everyone used to play bridge with physical cards of plastic-coated paper—paper, mind you! When Drew’s great-grandson gave him a vintage boxed set of two decks in a molded polystyrene holder, the four amigos (as they sometimes called themselves, Caitlin being a former high school Spanish teacher) had taken to playing cards “in person.” They started playing in the old canteen on the 10th floor, back when the windows had offered a view of red tile roofs and the flashy tops of palm trees. The new canteen/solarium looked out from the 35th floor over nothing but sea and sky. You had to go up to the roof to spot the other residential towers poking up out of the water in an archipelago that stretched north and south as far as the aging eye could see. Both decks of cards were worn around the edges now and had acquired a greasy feel. Between tricks they reached for their iBreathe O2 inhalers. By 2082, atmospheric oxygen levels had dropped around the globe. The obesity problem having been long since solved by the invention of cellulose noodles, Americans now counted units of oxygen expended rather than calories consumed, and oxygen conservation—a marriage of time-motion studies and SCUBA-diving technique—was the fastest-growing field in the 49 states. Jared had made his fortune in it, having gotten in on the ground floor 70-odd years ago with an undergraduate research project to determine which was more oxygen-efficient: the twist-off cap or a hand-held bottle opener. The O2-measuring protocol that he designed was still in use. Millennials they used to be called. Images of tiny people holding hands as they [End Page 168] jumped from tall buildings were embedded in their collective unconscious. Three out of four of them had helped a grandchild build a tower of blocks and fly a toy airplane into the side of it to knock it down. An odd feeling of relief and expiation—the end of suspense, the emptying of guilt—always came over them as the blocks tumbled down to the sound of the grandchild’s laughter. In April 2010, when the Gulf oil spill began with a blast that became a rupture between all time up to that moment (i.e., time poised, as time...

Children’s recognition of pride

The purpose of this experiment was to examine when children identify their own experience as one of pride after they complete a difficult and competitive task (i.e., race a confederate in building a tower of blocks). A sample of 144 children between 3 and 6years of age participated in one of three conditions. Children were told to try to build a tower of blocks taller than a confederate’s tower (exceed standard) or tried and failed to build a tower of blocks taller than the confederate’s tower (fail standard), or children were asked to build a tower of blocks alongside a confederate (no standard). Results revealed a developmental progression of recognizing pride in which children first began showing nonverbal behaviors that were reliably coded as conveying pride at around 4years of age. Children began to apply the label/term “pride” to a photograph conveying pride in another peer at around 4years of age and recognized their own experience as one of pride following a competitive task at around 5years of age.

Teasing and clowning in infancy

Summary "… do not take from me your laughter..... it opens for me all the doors of life "— Pablo NerudaBefore they speak or walk or crawl, infants joke. Infant laughter captured the attention of Aristotle, who thought it was the sign of the entry of the soul into the body, and of Darwin, who noted its emergence in the fourth month of life. Darwin saw such laughter as the early appreciation of humour, the presence at this age of which should not surprise us too much, given the early emergence of play in other mammals. In the twentieth century, however, these observations faded from scientific attention; humour began to be seen as an intellectual achievement requiring complex cognitive abilities, with infant laughter seen merely as a reaction to external stimuli. Recent research, however, has uncovered remarkable cognitive and emotional sensitivities in very young infants. And, as it turns out, humour and laughter in infants offer a rich source of insights into their understanding of the world, and indeed for our understanding of infants. The study of infant humour is no joke.

Visuospatial, Visuoperceptual, and Visuoconstructive Abilities in Congenital Hypothyroidism

Individuals with congenital hypothyroidism (CH), even those diagnosed and treated early, experience selective cognitive deficits, the most striking of which involves the visuocognitive domain. However, the range and nature of their visuocognitive disturbances is not fully understood. We assessed a range of higher-order visuocognitive abilities in 19 children and adolescents with CH and 19 age- and sex-matched typically developing peers (TD) using a battery of neuropsychological tests and a novel self-report measure of sense of direction. CH scored lower than TD on direct tests of visuocognitive function (judging line orientation, parts-to-whole localization, copying three-dimensional block towers, discriminating designs, and matching unfamiliar faces in ¾ profile-view) as well as on self-reported problems in spatial ability. Visuocognitive problems were not global as CH and TD did not differ at copying two-dimensional block designs, mentally rotating and matching abstract shapes, or at matching unfamiliar front-view faces, design features, or designs that engaged either figure-ground segregation, visual constancy, or closure. Early and concurrent thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) levels were associated with visuocognitive ability, although attention and working memory were not. Individuals with CH exhibit selective visuocognitive weaknesses, some of which are related to early and concurrent TSH levels.