Helping Children Enter Into Another's Experiences: The Look and Feel of It

The role of focusing 4-year-olds' attention on “feeling” or “looking” was examined in three experiments by testing predictions about children's memory for their interactions with an adult partner as they engaged in a collaborative task. Children made collages with an adult partner, and they were later asked to remember who placed the pieces on the collage. Children were more likely to claim they placed pieces actually placed by their partner (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), unless directed to think about how their partner looked when placing the partner's pieces (Experiments 1 and 3). False claims were observed after children were directed to think about how it would “feel” to perform the actions, whether motoric instructions were focused on the self (Experiment 2, N = 48) or partner (Experiment 1, N = 40, and Experiment 3, N = 24). Furthermore, false claims (referred to as I did it errors) were positively associated with accurate collage memory (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that adopting a perspective during encoding that involves “feeling” movements—whether focused on the self or partner—plays an important role in children's memory for collaboration (in this context, memory for contributions made by children or their adult partners to the completion of a collage). A focus on “feeling” may be a way to “enter into” the experiences of another, promoting anticipation and recoding, which may lead to better learning in both collaborative and non-collaborative contexts.