Self-report in children exposed to contingencies of competition and cooperation in computerized tasks

• Grant number: 13/19064-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: December 01, 2013
• End date: September 30, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Experimental Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Júlio César Coelho de Rose
• Grantee: Marlon Alexandre de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Speech provides individuals with the capacity of informing the verbal community about their feelings, motivational states and world events. Frequently, groups of individual benefit themselves for reporting accurate events because it provides low negative consequences to the group. This study intends to investigate in two experiments whether exposing children to contingencies of competition and cooperation in two different computerized tasks (computer game and music) would differentially influence the levels of children's verbal report accuracy on their performance, regardless of the type task. "Doing" will be defined as playing a computer game or naming the musical stimuli on the musical task. "Saying" will be defined as reporting whether or not they hit the target in the game or naming the musical stimuli. The first study consists in exposing six children to two tasks where the contingency of competition will be operating. In the baseline three children will be submitted to the musical task first, and then submitted to the game. The other children will be submitted to the game, and then to do musical task. After three to five baseline sessions children whose first task was musical task, will be submitted to this task again, but contingency of competition will be operating. The same procedure will be conducted with children whose first task was game. After six sessions the contingency of competition will be operating for the other tasks. Study 2 will be set up using the very same parameters of the previous experiment however instead of competing six experimentally naïve children will be exposed to a contingency of cooperation. The percentage of correspondent reports about hit and error during the execution of the task on the computer in all experimental phases will be considered as the relevant data of this study. Our focus will be to look for similarities and differences in the subjects' performances when exposed to two different sets of contingencies.