Published by: Ripon College

1. Emily Coates ’17: Summer research work will aid professional
endeavors
With future aspirations of working in pediatrics as an occupational therapist, senior Emily
Coates of Schofield, Wisconsin, spent the summer with young children as part of a
research project in the Infant and Young Child Cognition Lab. She studied aspects of the
cognitive development of children under the guidance of Associate Professor of
Psychology Kristine Kovack-Lesh.
A psychology major with a biology minor, Coates tracked the development of attention in
young children from ages 2½ to 6, while utilizing three different tasks. The first task,
Flanker, involves children looking at a line of fish and hitting the correct arrow keys on a
computer to determine which way the middle fish was swimming.
Pop the Bubbles was conducted on a tablet and was adapted from an infant looking task
to be more interactive. In this task, a dot appears either on the left, right, both sides of the

2. tablet, or not at all. A bubble then appears with a sea animal inside of it or either
congruent/ incongruent with the dot. The children must tap the tablet to pop the bubble.
The final task is a visual search task. The children are shown a shape and then it
disappears and reappears on a grid with other shapes. The children find the original
shape and touch it as fast as they can. The distractor shapes in the grid are either all the
same or all different shapes.
The goal of this research is to examine how attention in young children develops over
time. “For example, a younger child may not do as well as an older child on the Flanker
task and instead hit arrow keys for the direction of the other fish are facing instead of
specifically the middle fish,” Coates says. “We use the same tests for all ages, but how
well the children do on the same test may be dependent on how old they are.”
Throughout the research process, Coates hoped to link her research with different
research studies that have been done in the past on attention. This may give other
researchers a better idea of how attention develops in children.
“We are not examining kids for where they ‘should be,’ ” she says. “The research we are
doing may in the future be used to develop some sort of developmental scale to compare
children to the average child of that age group’s attentional ability. However, it is
important to keep in mind that children vary in how fast they develop.”
During her summer work, Coates also collaborated with Chelsea Grahn Andrews ’15.
Andrews is in her second year in the developmental psychology Ph.D. program at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and is under the mentorship of Assistant Professor
Vanessa Simmering.
Coates believes that working closely with young children has helped her to gain a further
insight into their development, something she thinks will be useful in her future career
path as an occupational therapist specializing in pediatrics.
From her work this summer, Coates was surprised how much of a difference one year in
age can make in a child’s attention and their understanding of how they are supposed to
perform the different tasks. The project will continue through the school year with various
other students. When it comes time to analyze the results, Coates is hoping to see similar
results between her observations and the statistics.
Brianna Davis
Posted August 31, 2016 in Research, Student by Jaye Alderson.