What Happens Now?

3- to 7-year-old children and their caregivers who are participating in Project GARDEN and are able to understand and answer questions in English. To join Project GARDEN, or to see which study your child can do next, visit childrenhelpingscience.com/garden, click "Start Now", and select your child's name under "Find studies for..."

First, your child will watch stories with a child doing various things, and will judge how much trouble (if any) the child in the story will get into for how they behaved. Then, your child will watch a person picking toys out of a box and answer questions about the toys and boxes.

In the first game, we explore which behaviors children think are naughty, and what consequences children expect from various behaviors. Findings from this study will help us better understand how children balance their own and others' needs and what factors contribute to their decisions to cooperate with others. In the second game, we want to see how children generalize object properties after looking at a sample from a larger group, particularly considering the cost of sampling. By examining both how children navigate social interactions and how they infer object properties from their environment, we aim to gain a comprehensive understanding of the cognitive processes children use to make decisions and generalize information in various contexts.

15 minutes

After you finish the study, we will email you a $5 Amazon.com gift card within seven days. To be eligible for the gift card and certificate, (1) your child must be in the age range for this study, (2) English is (one of) your child's first language(s), (3) you need to submit a valid consent statement, (4) we need to see that there is a child with you during the experiment. Each child is eligible to participate to receive a gift card only once.