Halloween and child development: Does trick- or – treating help our kids learn to socialize?  

 

With the upcoming holiday, it’s important to discuss the value they have. Especially with halloween children gain many benefits from it. For one, Halloween helps to nurture important social skills and allow parents the opportunity to be creastice with their children. In addition, Halloween has benefits for all ages. A baby is able to experience the world through the new touches of pumpkins, the sound of leaf crunching. For toddlers they get to taste new fall tastes that they haven’t had before. Preschoolers and early elementary school aged children are in the height of the pretending stage. They learn to role play, taking other people’s sides and creating the basis for empathy. But the most beneficial component of Halloween is that children get to spend that quality time with parents which helps to form positive family connections. 

 

Article link: https://www.al.com/entertainment/2016/10/halloween_and_child_developmen.html

 

Katie Nguyen

Research Assistant, UCONN Kids

 

                   

 

This week’s Friday feature is Olivia Arciero! She is a research assistant in the child language lab! She is a senior pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science with a minor in English. She is from Cheshire, Connecticut, about an hour away from UConn Storrs. At home she loves to hike and play guitar, she’s been playing for 13 years!

  The study she is helping with is titled “The Relationships between Neural Encoding of Speech and Lexical Access.” 

• IRB protocol #: H20-0078
• PI: Letitia Naigles
• Student Researcher: Lisa Tecoulesco
• Link to our lab page: https://cll.research.uconn.edu/

In this study they are investigating the relationship between brainstem responses to speech and eye-movements in response to speech. What they are doing is measuring the children’s brain waves while they watch a video and recording their eye movements while they are asked to identify words. They are hoping to see whether there is a relationship between how children neurally encode language via the brainstem, and their eye-movements during sentence comprehension. Our kids are aged 6-12 and it’s always fun to see how excited they are when they see what their brain waves look like!

In conjunction with the study she is a research assistant for her own investigation titled “Predictors of Individual Differences in Semantic Competition During Lexical Access.” (Same IRB info) Her general research interests lie in how the brain processes and stores information. In this study she will look at semantic competition in an attempt to discover whether early auditory processing or semantic categorization abilities explain individual differences in a semantic competition task (ex: Identifying whether “robin” and “penguin” are both members of the same category “bird”).