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Research Spotlight

The Research Spotlight section of the monthly newsletter is one way Children’s School parents can learn about research in progress.

Also, each time your child participates in a study that involves playing a “game” with a researcher (i.e., as opposed to merely being observed), he or she will get a participation sticker suggesting that you, “Ask me about the … game” and a study description detailing the task.

Feel free to contact Dr. Vales to discuss any questions you have about research.

LiLi DiMuzio, an undergraduate honors thesis student working with Dr. David Rakison and recipient of a Dietrich Honors Fellowship, conducted the Friendship Game with all classrooms as part of her thesis project. The goal of her project was to understand whether children use existing friendship connections between people to infer additional friendship connections. In her study, LiLi showed children pairs of people who were friends (e.g., person A and B; then person B and C) and then asked the children whether the people who were not previously shown together (in this example, person A and C) would also be friends. If children use these kinds of transitive relations to make inferences about friendships, then they might assume that two people who have a friend in common are also friends.

Molly Niehaus, a research associate working with me, is conducting the Who Did You See? Games. Together with students Ish Asharya and Ash Gelber, we are interested in understanding if increased exposure to different social groups can improve a common difficulty in recognizing faces of people from different racial/ethnic backgrounds (often referred to as the other-race effect). To increase exposure to faces of different social groups without explicit instruction, we use a child-friendly matching game that has been successfully used by other researchers – children are shown pairs of faces and shapes and asked to remember which face goes with which shape. To assess whether there are changes as a result of this exposure, children complete the memory game and the preferences game before and after playing the matching game with realistic or drawn faces. The results of this study will help us understand whether the cross-race effect is comparable in real and drawn faces, and whether exposure to different levels of realism in face depictions (like what children might encounter in different media) impacts the cross-race effect – opening the way for future studies examining how exposure to various types of media influences children’s ability to recognize faces across racial/ethnic groups and whether those experiences relate to social preferences.

As always, if you have any questions about research, please let me know.

Stay curious!

Dr. Catarina Vales