"Bias and Sensitivity to Task Constraints in Spontaneous Relational Attention"

​Associate Professor Lindsey Richland (right) published an article with colleagues in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology assessing the presence of higher relational responding in children.
 
The title of the article is “Bias and Sensitivity to Task Constraints in Spontaneous Relational Attention.”
 
Co-authors are Ashley N. Murphy (first author, University of Chicago), Yinyuan Zheng (Northwestern University) Apoorva Shivaram (Northwestern University), and Elayne Vollman (University of Chicago).
 
Richland’s research foci include children's reasoning, higher order thinking, mathematical thinking, and executive function. She is principal investigator (PI) on an IES grant that is studying how stress responses impact math learning in children. She also is PI on a National Science Foundation grant researching UCI undergraduates’ current stressors during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of stressors on students’ learning, with the goal of testing strategies for supporting effective e-learning during this period. Richland is director of UCI’s Science of Learning Laboratory. Watch Richland discuss her research with Dean Richard Arum here (26:00).

​Abstract

​Two experiments examined factors that predicted children’s tendencies to match objects versus relations across scenes when no instruction was given. Specifically, we assessed the presence of higher relational responding in children by (a) age, (b) greater presumed experience in generating relations through socialization in China versus the United States, and (c) in children with greater manipulated experience via a relational priming task. Experiment 1 showed that Chinese and U.S. children across all ages showed an initial bias to match objects versus relations across scenes. However, older children in both regions were more likely to notice features of the task that indicated attending to relational matches was a more reliable solution, and shifted their responding toward relations over the course of the task. Experiment 2 replicated the object-mapping bias and age effects within U.S. children while also examining the impact of directly manipulating children’s relational experiences to test the malleability of the bias. Before the main scene-mapping task, children did a relation generation task known to prime attention to relations. This did not override the initial bias toward object mapping, but it magnified the role of age, making older children increasingly sensitive to task features that prompted relational matches, further shifting their responding toward relations over the course of the task.