The title is a bit misleading - it's basically about how babies/kids learn by observation and that we should give them more opportunity to observe/experiment rather than tell them how the world works
> In 2002 Gyorgy Gergely, Harold Bekkering and Ildiko Kiraly did a different version of this study. Sometimes the experimenters’ arms were wrapped in a blanket when she tapped her forehead on the box. The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands.
> In 2013 David Buttelmann and his colleagues did yet another version. First, the babies heard the experimenter speak the same language they did or a different one. Then the experimenter tapped her head on the box. When she had spoken the same language, the babies were more likely to tap the box with their foreheads; when she spoke a different language they were more likely to use their hands.
> In other words, babies don’t copy mindlessly — they take note of who you are and why you act.
One of the interesting things I learned teaching foreign languages is that people only remember things that they understand. That makes intuitive sense, but what I found most interesting is that if someone doesn't understand something, they will often forget that it ever happened.
For example, I once asked my students to bring in their textbook for the next class. I was speaking English (foreign language for the students). Not one student in the 30 brought their textbook the next day. The weird thing is that not one of the students even remembered me saying something that they didn't understand. I've done a seminar where I demonstrate this effect. I say something in Japanese to an English speaking audience. I even make a remark about it. 20 minutes later I ask if anyone remembers me saying something in Japanese. Most people do not. Even after only 20 minutes people completely filter out things that don't make sense to them. When I saw this happening, I immediately found some scientific papers describing the effect. Unfortunately I seem to have lost all my notes so I don't have links handy any more :-(
So, without knowing more, my guess is that the babies get confused with the foreign language and subsequently forget the whole episode.
BTW, knowing this dramatically improved my teaching. If you realise that students who don't understand something in class will actually forget the entire class, you realise how important it is to probe understanding for every person in the class.
And just to get a plug in because people often complain about the quality of education that their children get. I only taught for 5 years, but if there was one thing that I would concentrate on to improve education it's to reduce class sizes. I had classes of 43 (!) most of the time I was teaching. I had fifty minute classes. You can do the math to see how much time I had to help each student individually. In my last year, I restructured my classes reducing my "instruction" time (where I explain things) to 5 minutes a class. I spent the rest of the class probing and evaluating comprehension. Test scores improved dramatically across the board.
