Simon Says
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 126 (2014) 112–119
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp
Brief Report
What makes Simon Says so difficult for young children? Peter J. Marshall ⇑, Ashley R. Drew
Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 23 August 2013
Revised 30 March 2014
Available online 5 June 2014
Keywords:
Executive functioning
Inhibition
Social
Young children
Cognitive control
Inconsistency
a b s t r a c t
Compared with conceptually similar response inhibition tasks, the game of Simon Says is particularly challenging for young children.
However, possible …show more content…
These analyses showed the same pattern as in the main analyses, with a significant main effect of the number of experimenters on children’s performance on inhibition trials,
F(1, 39) = 20.60, p < .001, g2p = .35, with performance being significantly worse for the one-person condition than for the two-person condition. As in the main analyses, there was no significant main effect of observing the actions being performed, F(1, 39) = 0.67, p = .46, g2p = .01, and no significant interaction between the two factors, F(1, 39) = 0.08, p = .78, gp2 = .002.
The mean duration of the Bear–Dragon trials was 3.72 s (SD = 0.37), which did not differ significantly from the mean trial duration for the one-person Simon Says tasks (p > .50) and was significantly shorter than the mean trial duration for both of the two-person Simon Says tasks (p < .01).
Discussion
In the current study, we probed why the game of Simon Says is especially challenging for young children. In an early consideration of this question, Strommen (1973) offered (but did not test) three possibilities. First, the instructed actions vary across trials, so the task involves an element of uncertainty. Second, the activation signal and part of the response instruction are presented in the …show more content…
849). In line with this suggestion, LaVoie and colleagues (1981) reported a significant improvement in 6- to 11year-old children’s performance on Simon Says when an experimenter did not perform the actions.
Surprisingly, in the current study, we did not replicate this effect of observing the actions. It is possible that the effects of needing to inhibit the imitation of an observed action may be more apparent when the actions being performed by the experimenter are more relevant to task demands. For instance, young children often perform poorly on Luria’s hand game, which involves seeing a specific hand action (e.g., making a fist) and then producing a different action (e.g., pointing a finger) (Hughes,
1998; Simpson et al., 2013; Watson & Bell, 2013). However, in the standard version of Simon Says, the actions are performed by the experimenter on all trials and, therefore, can be considered to be irrelevant or distracting information. However, this does not fully explain our lack of replication of the findings of LaVoie and colleagues (1981), especially given that the effects of irrelevant or
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp
Brief Report
What makes Simon Says so difficult for young children? Peter J. Marshall ⇑, Ashley R. Drew
Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 23 August 2013
Revised 30 March 2014
Available online 5 June 2014
Keywords:
Executive functioning
Inhibition
Social
Young children
Cognitive control
Inconsistency
a b s t r a c t
Compared with conceptually similar response inhibition tasks, the game of Simon Says is particularly challenging for young children.
However, possible …show more content…
These analyses showed the same pattern as in the main analyses, with a significant main effect of the number of experimenters on children’s performance on inhibition trials,
F(1, 39) = 20.60, p < .001, g2p = .35, with performance being significantly worse for the one-person condition than for the two-person condition. As in the main analyses, there was no significant main effect of observing the actions being performed, F(1, 39) = 0.67, p = .46, g2p = .01, and no significant interaction between the two factors, F(1, 39) = 0.08, p = .78, gp2 = .002.
The mean duration of the Bear–Dragon trials was 3.72 s (SD = 0.37), which did not differ significantly from the mean trial duration for the one-person Simon Says tasks (p > .50) and was significantly shorter than the mean trial duration for both of the two-person Simon Says tasks (p < .01).
Discussion
In the current study, we probed why the game of Simon Says is especially challenging for young children. In an early consideration of this question, Strommen (1973) offered (but did not test) three possibilities. First, the instructed actions vary across trials, so the task involves an element of uncertainty. Second, the activation signal and part of the response instruction are presented in the …show more content…
849). In line with this suggestion, LaVoie and colleagues (1981) reported a significant improvement in 6- to 11year-old children’s performance on Simon Says when an experimenter did not perform the actions.
Surprisingly, in the current study, we did not replicate this effect of observing the actions. It is possible that the effects of needing to inhibit the imitation of an observed action may be more apparent when the actions being performed by the experimenter are more relevant to task demands. For instance, young children often perform poorly on Luria’s hand game, which involves seeing a specific hand action (e.g., making a fist) and then producing a different action (e.g., pointing a finger) (Hughes,
1998; Simpson et al., 2013; Watson & Bell, 2013). However, in the standard version of Simon Says, the actions are performed by the experimenter on all trials and, therefore, can be considered to be irrelevant or distracting information. However, this does not fully explain our lack of replication of the findings of LaVoie and colleagues (1981), especially given that the effects of irrelevant or