U study teaching kids to retrain thoughts

One child punches another in the face. One can't figure out why she has to wait to get home to eat dessert. Another talks in class without raising his hand.

The impulsiveness of children has plagued parents forever. But two researchers at the University of Minnesota are doing research on children's brains that could have broad-ranging implications on how we understand how children reason and learn, on the debate of nature versus nurture and how teaching children in different ways could affect their lives for decades to come.

The focus of the research, done by Phil Zelazo and Stephanie Carlson at the Institute for Child Development, is the development of "executive function" in the brain. That's the way humans regulate their thoughts and actions, such as delaying gratification and controlling their attention span. Executive function is being able to translate knowledge of a situation into action.

Teaching children different kinds of reasoning strategies, they say, could make children better at regulating their own behavior, more likely to consider their friends' opinions, and less likely to get into fights at school.

"What [Zelazo] is starting to show is that exposure to certain kinds of education and certain kinds of nurturing environments actually produce physically measurable changes in the brain," said Michael Feuer, executive director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academies of Science. "There's very clear evidence about the effect of nurture on individuals' capacity for learning and individuals' capacity for complex thinking."

It can all be boiled down to three pieces of candy.

One candy now

In one of the tests at the University's Child Study Center, a 3-year-old child is offered one piece of candy now, or two pieces of candy later. As any parent of a toddler knows, the child will likely pick the one piece now, regardless of what kind of reward they would get for waiting.

But here's where it gets complicated: If the researcher asks the child, "OK, now what should I have? One candy now or two later?" the child is good at telling the researcher to wait for the bigger reward.

Once the children get to age 4, chances are that their positions will have started to reverse. They are more likely to wait for the greater reward for themselves, but they will tell the researcher to take one candy now. They've started to take the researcher's point of view into account, and, the kids think, "maybe this other person is yearning for it like me."

What's changed? The structure of the brain, according to Carlson and Zelazo. The marked changes in early childhood continue into the child's school years, through adolescence, and "probably beyond," Zelazo said.

"We've been interested in trying to understand what it is that is changing that allows people to be more reflective, to take perspectives more readily, to plan for the future and to be less impulsive, and how that's related to the developing brain," he said.

Modern technology means they can look at images of physical changes in the brain, and try to tie them to changes in its function.

Children brought to the Child Study Center are connected to an EEG (electroencephalogram) machine, which creates a picture of the electrical activity of the brain. Researchers also use an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to visualize the brain's structure.

"We now have the opportunity to observe some of this stuff at a biological level, in ways that because of different imaging technologies, in a way that we couldn't before," Feuer said. "It's very exciting, new research on something that's been central to policy debates about teaching, learning, intellectual ability, intelligence, and so forth."

Becoming less impulsive

According to Clancy Blair, a professor in the department of applied psychology at New York University, what's interesting about the research at the University of Minnesota is that it is evaluating executive function when it is changing most rapidly: childhood.

When children are born, there is an overproduction of gray matter in the brain, and it reduces gradually, most likely as a result of the pruning of unused brain synapses, like a streamlining of the networks of neurons in the brain. The 3-year-old asking for one candy now has much more gray matter than the adult offering it to him.

"There's a lot more opportunities for dynamic restructuring of the brain earlier in chilhood," Zelazo said. When researchers see changes in MRI images of children's brains, they can correspond with "these really dramatic changes in children's behavior."

Practical implications of the research -- other than creating a super-race of humans who really, really care about their friends' opinions -- include helping adolescents who have impaired executive function, and get keep getting into trouble, getting hurt, or hurting other children.

Giving the children a boost to help them make small decisions could have "cascading" benefits, Zelazo said.

"If giving a child a boost in this kind of perspective helps that child make a decision like, 'My friends are smoking cigarettes but I think that's going to be a bad idea in the long term, I don't want to get addicted,'" he said. "The consequences of being better able to make adaptive decisions at an early age could add up."

Research done recently by Adele Diamond at the University of British Columbia showed that preschool activities that enhance executive function, like using play games to teach children to consider another's opinion and apply rules selectively, may improve academic achievement, reduce diagnoses of ADHD and even help close the achievement gap.

As for "normal" children, even if research advances far enough that we would know exactly what kindergarten games should be played in order to improve executive function, Zelazo said, "it remains an open question whether that's really a good thing."

"Do we want all kids to be self-regulating?" he asked. "Do we want them to be thinking about long-term consequences? Maybe there's a reason why kids are impulsive and why they don't take life so seriously in the way adults do."

For Feuer, the research is still in its earliest stages, but "even as far along as its gotten, it's pretty exciting stuff."

"It's interesting, it's challenging," he said, "and this new technology is actually making it possible now to imagine that we will be able to measure changes in learning and memory and absorption of information in ways that before, we had to rely on instruments that were much more limited."

Emily Johns • 952-882-9056