Sunday, January 18, 2009

Need a guinea pig? Have some kids.

They are yours to do with as you please, just don't break them. Scientists who may otherwise not be able to round up some test subjects, are now using their own children, they are there and they are free.
“You need subjects, and they’re hard to get,” said Deborah Linebarger, a developmental psychologist who directs the Children’s Media Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, who has involved her four children in her studies of the effect of media on children.

Arthur Toga, a neurology professor at the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying brain change, scanned his three children’s brains using magnetic resonance imaging.

Stephen M. Camarata at the medical school at Vanderbilt, has involved all seven of his children in studies of learning problems and speech.

And Deb Roy, at M.I.T., embedded 11 video cameras and 14 microphones in ceilings throughout his house, recording 70 percent of his son’s waking hours for his first three years, amassing 250,000 hours of tape for a language development study he calls the Human Speechome Project.
Aside from the potential harm to the kids, you have to wonder about data integrity when parental emotions take over.
when Karen Dobkins, a U.C.S.D. psychology professor, enlisted her infant twins, Gabriel and Jacob, she said, “it was kind of painful, because one of my twin boys basically played the game really well, but my other son, we couldn’t even use his data.” She said that “made me worry that he had autism.”

Her worries proved unfounded. Still, she said, “I took only the good data and copied it and put it in both of their baby books.”
Curious example of development in twins and you wonder if her worry diverted her from a potential discovery. Had they been someone else's kids, she might have been on to something.

// posted by montag @ 1:04 PM
Comments:
This is old skool. B.F. Skinner was famous for doing this with his own kids, though a) no, he never raised one of them in a Skinner box, and b) no, they didn't turn out crazy due to his experiments with them -- they all turned out to be well-adjusted professionals who lived normal lives. Seems the parental instincts end up overruling any desire to do something dangerous or risky to their own kids. Huh. Imagine that.

- Badtux the Skinnerian Penguin
# posted by Blogger BadTux : 7:42 PM
 

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