Monsters, tooth fairies and germs!

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:34:43 -0400

Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Harris argues that children as young as preschool age can discern whether or not they're hearing the truth, even in a domain for which they have no previous knowledge, by accurately judging the reliability of the person who's telling them. "Particularly among 4-year-olds, but also among 3-year-olds, they're selective," he says. "They come to trust somebody who seems to tell the truth, and to mistrust somebody who's not." In collaboration with two postdoctoral fellows, Melissa Koenig and Fabrice Clément, Harris created experiments in which a pair of speakers - people in one case, puppets in another - presented various claims to the 3- and 4-year-olds.

Imagination important for children's cognitive development

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:19:14 -0400

Paul Harris, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, says there are two very different ways to define imagination. "You can either see it as disappearing or waning during childhood, or you can see it the way I do, as persisting throughout life," Harris says. The message in his book, "The Work of the Imagination," is this: "Suppose we think of pretend play and fantasy as something that's quite characteristic of young children -- it makes them playful and endearing but doesn't really contribute to their later cognitive development and by adulthood it has in some sense disappeared. I tried to argue that this is wrong," Harris said.

all Paul Harris stories

Monsters, tooth fairies and germs!

Imagination important for children's cognitive development