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| Taking turns |
| a struggle until age 5 |
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All early childhood educators and carers will have painstakingly separated two children fighting over a toy and taken the time to explain the value of sharing and turn taking. In fact, this is probably a daily experience for some of you.
Well, new research out of the UK has shown that children may not learn the value of turn taking until they are 5 years old. Could your efforts have been in vain?
Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science from Warwick Business School Dr Alicia Melis compared the turn-taking skills of young children and chimpanzees. Her research revealed that five year olds have much better turn taking skills than three and a half year old children and chimpanzees, which may suggest the skill develops as their cognitive abilities mature, rather than through adult interventions to change behaviour.
According to Dr Melis the study shows that although chimpanzees and young children may be able to engage in reciprocal interactions that are driven by past events – 'she was nice to me, so I will be nice to her now' –they are not aware of prospective turn-taking and unable to understand the long-term benefits of taking turns.
"This suggests that more complex planning and reasoning skills are necessary for turn-taking,” said Dr Melis.
To investigate children's and chimpanzees' turn-taking abilities for their paper One for You, One for Me: Humans' Unique Turn-Taking Skills, published in Psychological Science, Dr Melis and colleagues devised an experiment involving rewards placed on specially designed trays.
Each pair of participants had to work together to pull the trays so that a reward – stickers for children, fruit for chimpanzees – would be reachable. Importantly, pulling one tray resulted in losing the reward on the other tray.
The researchers tested a total of 96 pre-schoolers, half of who were three and a half years old and half of who were five years old. Each age-matched pair completed 24 turn taking trials. They also tested 12 chimpanzees, each of who completed 48 trials with one partner and 48 trials with another partner.
The results showed that the five year old children managed to access a reward on 99.5 per cent of the trials, while the three and a half year olds were successful in only 62.3 per cent of the trials.
The five year-olds also took turns more often than the three-and-a-half year-olds and their turn taking increased as they completed more trials.
The data showed that although some of the younger pairs eventually developed a turn taking strategy, it took them a while to do so – some of the three and a half year olds never resolved their conflict of interest.
"Although young children are encouraged to take turns across many different situations, including in interactions with adults and when sharing resources with other children, our findings show that it was only from age five when the children were able to spontaneously take turns to solve a conflict of interests,” said Dr Melis.
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