دانلود رایگان مقاله تاثیر زمینه های اجتماعی برنامه ریزی های آینده

Abstract

Children’s joint action and advance planning skills are both undergoing development during the preschool years, but little is known about how joint action contexts influence children’s advance planning. In the first experiment, three-year-olds (N = 32) were better at planning ahead for a task in an individual compared to a joint condition when playing with a social partner. A second experiment indicated that three-year-olds (N = 32) were as able to plan in advance with a non-social machine as when playing alone, suggesting that the effects found in the first experiment were not a function of different timing or cognitive demands between individual and joint conditions, but were unique to the social context.

8.3. Limitations and future directions

The relative complexity of the planning task in this research may have provided the ideal setting in which to examine differences across social contexts at this age. It is likely that, given a less demanding task (or this task at an older age), children would have performed similarly in the individual and joint conditions in Experiment 1. On the other hand, a more difficult task may have created floor effects in which children would not have performed at above chance levels in either condition. The variability in advance planning across conditions in this research was likely due to an interplay between task difficulty and developmental period. Whether and how individual versus joint planning differs in different developmental periods and at different levels of task complexity should be explored further. The specific context and knowledge about the individual with which the child is engaged may alter how children interact with the joint action partner. In the current experiment, it is unknown whether children viewed the puppet as a similarly skilled peer, an adult who was not helpful in scaffolding, or a play companion who was pretending to be naïve. Better defining how children view the interaction partner and how different partners alter their behavior will help define the constraints and generalizability of the current findings. For example, whether performance differs when playing with parents, who may scaffold their actions, or with peers, who are less predictable in their actions, is an interesting avenue of future work. In the current research, we do not know whether children perceived Kip as more or less predictable than the machine in Experiment 2. One possible explanation for the current findings is that children perceived the social agent (Kip) as less predictable than the machine and thus found the presence of the social other more distracting during their own actions. Although we controlled the actual predictability of Kip’s and the machine’s actions, humans are typically less systematic and consistent in their responses than are machines, and this knowledge could have accordingly influenced children’s interactions with Kip. Another alternative is presented by the on-line simulation account (e.g., Wilson & Knoblich, 2005), which proposes that it is more difficult to separate one’s own action plans from a human agent compared to a non-human agent because of the functionally equivalent format in the former, but not the latter, case. A better understanding of how actions of others are represented and influence advance planning within joint action development is critical for further exploration of potential educational consequences and atypical developmental patterns.