Social influences on children's learning
Name
1086609736-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
11.47 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
50f1e021022f377d7569d9cc83185003
Author(s)
Leonard, Julia Anne, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor(s)
John D.E. Gabrieli and Laura E. Schulz.
Date Issued
2018
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Adults greatly impact children's learning: they serve as models of how to behave, and as parents, provide the larger social context in which children grow up. This thesis explores how adults impact children's learning across two time scales. Chapters 2 and 3 ask how a brief exposure to an adult model impacts children's moment-to-moment approach towards learning, and Chapters 4 and 5 look at how children's long-term social context impacts their brain development and capacity to learn. In Chapter 2, I show that preschool-age children integrate information from adults' actions, outcomes, and testimony to decide how hard to try on novel tasks. Children persist the longest when adults practice what they preach: saying they value effort, or giving children a pep talk, in conjunction with demonstrating effortful success on their own task. Chapter 3 demonstrates that social learning about effort is present in the first year of life and generalizes across tasks. In Chapter 4, I find that adolescents' long-term social environments have a selective impact on neural structure and function: socioeconomic-status (SES) relates to hippocampal-prefrontal declarative memory, but not striatal-dependent procedural memory. Finally, in Chapter 5 I demonstrate that the neural correlates of fluid reasoning differ by SES, suggesting that positive brain development varies by early life environment. Collectively, this work elucidates both the malleable social factors that positively impact children's learning and the unique neural and cognitive adaptations that children develop in response to adverse environments.
Description
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2018.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 129-170).
Subjects
Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
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