A new study by the University of Michigan has found that ecological psychology is the key to human evolution.
The research, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, also suggests that evolutionary psychologists can be effective teachers and influence their students.
In a paper titled “The evolutionary psychology of human development,” researchers compared the evolutionary psychology that psychologists use to teach children to play video games with those taught by their colleagues.
The result: students who played the same games but had experienced the psychological impacts of playing with friends did better on tests of cognition and social interaction.
“The more you learn about the psychological impact of the games you play, the better you are able to recognize it in your students,” said lead author Michael R. Miller, a psychology professor at the University at Buffalo.
“And if you learn from teachers, you can also learn from the other people you’re interacting with.”
Miller said his team’s results “have implications for the kinds of psychological interventions that psychologists can help their students do with video games.”
In other words, he said, if you want to help kids play video-game-based games with their friends, you have to first learn from your colleagues about the cognitive and social impact of video-games.
Miller’s research found that evolutionary psychology is a powerful tool for helping children learn, but it’s also a powerful influence on their own cognition and behavior.
“If you want your students to be able to use this tool effectively, you really need to understand its strengths and weaknesses,” Miller said.
Miller is part of a growing body of research that has shown that people’s innate cognitive and emotional intelligence is shaped by their social environment.
This, in turn, shapes how they interact with their peers.
“We’ve known for a long time that if you put kids with different social backgrounds in the same room and you have them interact with each other for a prolonged period of time, you get a different pattern of brain structure,” Miller explained.
“Our work indicates that if your social environment is similar for everyone, you’ll get the same brain structure for everyone.
It’s that simple.”
Miller and his colleagues found that social and behavioral differences in kids were linked to differences in the way they interacted with their teachers.
For instance, children who were more likely to engage in group interactions tended to have more similarities between the cognitive styles and behavior patterns of their teachers, while students who were less likely to interact in groups had a stronger pattern of similarity between the behavioral styles and cognitive styles of their educators.
The researchers then used a set of tasks to explore whether the similarity in cognitive styles or behavior patterns between teachers and students can influence the way their students think and act.
In other, the researchers looked at whether the similarities in cognitive and behavioral styles of teachers and kids are linked to their ability to identify and respond to the cognitive or behavioral consequences of their peers’ behaviors.
For example, if a teacher made a remark that the student was being disrespectful to others or acting too aggressively, that child would be more likely than a child without a teacher to associate the teacher’s comment with the behavior and respond in a way that the teacher disapproved of.
Miller said he and his team were looking for a correlation between teacher and student cognitive style and behavior, and were especially interested in how teachers might relate to students.
The team used a game to test students’ ability to distinguish between the kinds and types of cognitive styles that their teachers were exhibiting.
The students were also asked to identify how much of their cognitive style was related to the kind of behavior that their teacher had said.
In the experiment, the students who had been given the cognitive style task performed worse on tests that asked them to identify the meaning of words like “silly” and “ridiculous” and to correctly answer questions like “Do you think the person who made the comment was a stupid person?”
“There’s a lot of overlap in the two, and this is why we think that cognitive styles can influence how kids are influenced by their teachers,” Miller told LiveScience.
The scientists also found that differences in cognitive style were associated with students’ willingness to make friends and social interactions with other people.
For a student who scored low on cognitive style, for instance, a high-quality teacher would make the student feel comfortable in their class and encouraged them to socialize with others.
This could be a valuable tool for teaching children, Miller said, but in order to be effective, the cognitive skills that teachers use to help their kids learn must be integrated with other aspects of their life.
“I think that’s a big piece missing,” Miller added.
“But we need to do it because we can’t make this work if we don’t.”
