Children's Cognitive Research Lab Newsletter for 2009 Who we are: The CCRL is part of the Cognition, Action, and Perception Center (CAP) and directed by Dr. Heidi Kloos, Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. What we study: We are interested in how children understand basic, underlying concepts of science and mathematics, and how they use these concepts in their reasoning about the world. Our findings help early childhood researchers at the University of Cincinnati make positive contributions to the fields of science education, child development, and psychology. IRB: The University of Cincinnati Institutional Review Board - Social and Behavioral Sciences reviews all non-medical research projects that involve human participants to be sure the rights and welfare of participants are protected. If you have questions, you may contact The University of Cincinnati Institutional Review Board - Social and Behavioral Sciences at (513) 558-5784. If you have a concern about a study you may call the UC Research Compliance Hotline at (800) 889-1547, or you may send an e-mail to irb@ucmail.uc.edu. Hello from CCRL In this newsletter you can read about some of the studies that we currently running. Even more information about our studies, as well as how to participate in them, is available on our website at uc.edu/ccrl. Robot Study To study the development of coordination, we asked children between the ages of 5 and 12 to press a button at a certain rhythm. The story line involves a robot who needs power to return to his planet, Fracton. Children are asked to listen to a metronome (we call this the "energy pulse") and keep time by pressing a button (we call this the "power pod"). We then measure the child's level of coordination using non-linear tool of mathematics. We found that younger children show uneven and unpredictable patterns when estiating time. However, by age 10, temporal estimation patterns are much like those of adults. Our next step is to look at this coordination while children are walking on a treadmill. Information Processing in Children with Autism Children are presented with enormous amounts of information on a daily basis. What do they do with all of these details? Normally developing children form Gestalts, or large chunks of information, that often omit unnecessary details. We have found that children have a difficult time rememberingisolated pieces of information, and the systematically misremember facts that do not fit into this larger whole. Conversely, children who fall within the spectrum of austistic disorders are more likely to be comfortable with isolated pieces of information. If this is true, they should not have the same tendency to towards misremembering incoherent pieces of information like normally developing children. This study investigates the difference between normally developing children and children with autism on their ability to integrate pieces of information. To what extent do children with autism outperform normally developing children in tasks that elicit processes of integrating isolated facts? Support is kindly provided by: Children's Cognitive Research Lab University of Cincinnati 115 Dyer Hall, Box 0376 (513) 556-5076