Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Graham Wright, Associate Research Scientist, Maurice & Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University

It’s been nearly two years since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the subsequent start of the Israel-Hamas war – and still, antisemitism shows no sign of abating as one of the thorniest issues at American colleges and universities.

University administrators have responded in various ways to Jewish students’ reports of harassment and discrimination during and after pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 and 2025.

Some schools, such as Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, have banned student organizations associated with the protests, expelled student protesters and instituted anti-bias training programs on antisemitism.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, launched a task force to combat antisemitism at 10 universities, including Harvard and Columbia. It has also withheld federal funding from a range of universities on the grounds of their alleged inaction over antisemitism.

These efforts have often been as controversial as the problem they’re trying to solve.

Critics have accused university administrators of violating academic freedom and penalizing legitimate political protests.

And federal judges have pushed back against – and in some cases blocked – the Trump administration from withholding federal funding to schools, echoing calls from commentators and many American Jews that concerns about antisemitism are merely a pretext for punishing political opponents.

Since the Oct. 7 attack occurred, my team at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University has been trying to understand how antisemitism looks and is changing on campuses.

Our findings show antisemitic ideas are not necessarily widespread among university students or faculty in the U.S. But that doesn’t mean antisemitism is not a serious problem, since just a few students or faculty members with extreme views can shape an entire campus’s climate.

Studying antisemitism on campus

We first surveyed about 2,000 Jewish college students in December 2023 at about 50 schools with large Jewish populations.

We surveyed those same Jewish students again in the spring of 2024, while also conducting in-depth interviews with students and Jewish campus professionals about their experiences with antisemitism on campus.

During this same time period, we also conducted a survey of over 4,000 mostly non-Jewish students at these same schools.

In the spring of 2025, we conducted a survey of over 2,000 faculty members at 146 research-intensive universities, often called R1.

Here are some of our most important findings.

1. Antisemitism isn’t just about harassment

Our December 2023 survey found that the majority of Jewish students said there was a hostile environment toward Jews on their campus. This hostility was much more prevalent at some schools than others.

Students reported personal experiences of antisemitic harassment – especially on social media. But they also said they feel shunned or excluded from campus life. Jewish students at schools with higher reported levels of hostility were also less likely to say that they fully “belong” on their campus.

In our 2024 interviews, Jewish students reported being told by peers that they could no longer be friends due to their – real or perceived – support for Israel. They also said that their non-Jewish peers were actively avoiding them.

As one Jewish student put it, “No one wants to have a conversation with Jews right now.”

The majority of Jewish students who identify as politically liberal were especially likely to feel alienated and isolated. They were also especially likely to feel estranged from other liberals on campus.

Jewish students we interviewed also reported being shunned by friends who were critical of Israel, regardless of their own views on the actions of the Israeli government.

Multiple other studies have found that non-Jewish students reported they would not want to be friends with anyone who supports Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

2. Some Israel comments cross the line

Our research also shows that when it comes to debates about what is or is not antisemitic, Jewish students see a clear distinction between criticizing the actions of Israel’s government and denying Israel’s right to exist.

When we spoke to Jewish students in 2023 and 2024, we found the vast majority felt that denying Israel’s right to exist was antisemitic. But there was no similar consensus around other statements, such as accusing Israel of committing genocide.

3. Small groups drive antisemitism on campus

Our research also found that about 34% of non-Jewish undergraduates, and about 10% of non-Jewish faculty held views about Jews or Israel that most Jewish students find antisemitic.

About half the people in these groups expressed hostile views about Israel, such as denying that it has a right to exist and refusing to be friends with anyone who thinks differently.

The other half were less likely to express these extreme views on Israel but tended to agree with explicitly anti-Jewish statements such as “Jews in America have too much power.”

In contrast, two-thirds of non-Jewish students and about 90% of non-Jewish faculty did not hold views that Jewish students tend to see as antisemitic, even if they expressed deep criticism of Israel’s government.

4. Israel debates are relatively rare in class

Despite frequent news headlines about classroom discussions or protests related to the Israeli-Hamas war, 76% of faculty said that in the 2024-25 academic year the issue simply never came up in their class.

Other contentious topics such as climate change or racism in America were much more likely to be taught about or discussed in the classroom.

Responding to antisemitism

In our interviews, many Jewish undergraduates said they wanted their campus administrators to do more to address antisemitism. But some said that heavy-handed actions such as banning pro-Palestinian groups sometimes made things worse by further inflaming campus tensions and prompting criticism that Jewish students were receiving special treatment.

Similar concerns have been raised about the federal government’s approach, which, in the name of fighting antisemitism, has been focused on punishing entire schools and researchers in a wide variety of disciplines that have nothing to do with Jews or Israel, by withholding billions in federal funding.

The government has also initiated civil rights investigations and revoked visas for international students at some schools.

This approach, in my opinion, has the potential to alienate potential allies on and off campus, including faculty and students who oppose antisemitism in all its forms but are being harmed all the same by federal actions. Penalizing people in the name of helping Jewish students could also reinforce antisemitic stereotypes about oppressive Jewish power.

I think that healing Jewish students’ feelings of isolation and ostracism requires building, or rebuilding, social connections across ideological and religious lines. If university administrators, or the federal government, really want to help Jewish students, they should focus on bringing students together rather than driving them apart.

Graham Wright works for the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University

– ref. Antisemitism on campus is a real problem − but headlines and government-proposed solutions don’t match the experience of most Jewish students – https://theconversation.com/antisemitism-on-campus-is-a-real-problem-but-headlines-and-government-proposed-solutions-dont-match-the-experience-of-most-jewish-students-265041

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Julia R. Azari, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Marquette University

In a classic work on the modern presidency originally published in 1960, political scientist Richard Neustadt wrote that the American public “expects the man in the White House to do something about everything.”

These expectations, Neustadt argued, far exceeded the president’s ability to actually control outcomes.

More recently, political journalist John Dickerson, author of “The Hardest Job in the World,” noted that presidents typically have people demanding that they pay attention to about 250 problems at one time. But, quoting a productivity expert, Dickerson points out that priorities are like arms: “If you have more than two, you’re either crazy or lying.” The implication: Presidents have to shed 248 of those pressing concerns.

I study the American presidency. The research in the field, including my own, suggests that typically the politics of presidential attention is driven by two considerations.

The first comes down to delegation: As Barack Obama was fond of saying, no easy problem gets to the president’s desk. Presidents typically focus on the problems that no one else – not state or local governments, the bureaucracy or Cabinet secretaries – can deal with.

The other consideration is whether the issue is a winning one. Neustadt emphasizes this in his study of presidential power: Presidents enhance their reputations by winning conflicts, not losing them.

There are also plenty of examples of presidents wading into highly conflicted areas and alienating supporters or suffering policy defeats, including George W. Bush’s unsuccessful attempts to tackle the “third rail” of Social Security reform, and Bill Clinton’s failed efforts to enact health care reform.

As a result, presidents are typically expected to be focused on national security, economic management and other key issues that have to be handled at the national level. They are expected to only sparingly wage battles of will with leaders outside government – in the arts, business or education – and with state-level politicians who lie outside the president’s direct control.

Amid the many other ways he’s departed from American political tradition, President Donald Trump has turned these assumptions upside down. That has important implications for how Americans understand the scope and reach of presidential power.

Like most aspects of American politics, the presidency has become more defined by partisan politics over time. Trump has taken this evolution to a new level, rejecting the traditional role of statesman or a spokesperson for the whole nation.

Instead, he has adopted the role of partisan political warrior – and that means he is using the power of his office in areas and in ways previously considered off-limits to the president.

Hosting, decorating and critiquing clothing ads

Recently, President Trump reported that he might host the Kennedy Center Honors in December. He also reportedly had a strong hand in choosing the center’s honorees, a task normally undertaken over months and with public input.

He’s also been heavily involved in the redecoration of the White House, waged war on wind turbines and posted online about the controversy over actress Sydney Sweeney’s ad for American Eagle jeans.

His administration has issued detailed demands of numerous universities, wading directly into curriculum, personnel policies and the frequent target of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. While much of this effort has gone through the Department of Education, the president himself has issued executive orders and posted online about specific universities.

Traditionally, presidents have been especially hesitant to dive into areas where education intersected with difficult cultural conflicts. One of the most significant examples is the way that presidents reacted, from the 1950s through the 1970s, to Supreme Court orders mandating school desegregation.

To put it bluntly, presidents did not want to face the political dilemmas associated with enforcing the court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

As I note in my book “Backlash Presidents,” presidents are rarely eager to upend the racial status quo, even when they recognize its injustice.

Dwight Eisenhower, who was president when the Supreme Court issued the Brown decision, felt the decision placed new strain on the federal government to get involved in social relations and local issues. The feeling was bipartisan; Eisenhower’s presidential successor, Democrat John F. Kennedy, didn’t want to take a lead role in enforcing desegregation either.

Both, at different times, did eventually use federal force and power to uphold the law. Eisenhower mobilized the National Guard to protect Black students integrating a Little Rock, Arkansas, high school in 1957, and Kennedy in 1963 took similar action to protect Black students integrating schools in Alabama.

But federalism, which divides powers between national and state government, provided presidents with a strategically useful barrier to any further presidential action, allowing the two presidents to say that they were treading carefully because education was up to the states.

Obviously, this was a different time and context – the Department of Education didn’t exist yet, so there was not a clearly defined federal role in public education. But it represents an example of how presidents have typically looked to use structures such as federalism to leave tough issues to others and avoid political fallout.

It’s personal with Trump

Focusing attention on foreign policy and national security is less likely to stoke opposition. Those are areas where presidents have more latitude and can expand their power even more.

Presidents have traditionally not engaged in direct conflict with individual governors, industry leaders or university presidents if they can help it. They’ve engaged in policy battles, but generally not personal ones.

Trump’s approach has been very different.

With Department of Justice investigations and public criticism, his administration has targeted specific law firms and individuals whom Trump dislikes. The president has issued executive orders about the “forced use” of paper straws.

Is Trump’s attention on the personal a problem for the nation?

Presidents have been challenged for being too focused on minor issues and details, including Jimmy Carter, whose attention to things such as the schedule of the White House tennis courts drew scorn from critics.

Some presidents have been criticized as too quick to delegate to others, as was Ronald Reagan, who was seen as inattentive to important details. George W. Bush likewise was knocked for delegating too much, especially in crucial areas of foreign policy and intelligence.

Diving deeply into partisan politics

But Trump’s shifting of presidential priorities signals a much deeper political change.

First, some of these actions have also been directly related to cultural conflict – the fights with universities over DEI polices, commenting on the Sydney Sweeney ad.

Trump is hardly the first president to elevate a hot-button cultural issue for political gain – George W. Bush famously promoted a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage leading into his 2004 reelection campaign.

But presidents have traditionally seen more costs than benefits associated with campus speech issues or race questions that could be handled elsewhere.

A February 2025 article in The Root, whose motto is “Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude,” points to “five ridiculously petty actions” from the administration. All are related to race or LGBTQ symbols or visuals, such as the removal of references to LGBTQ Americans from government websites and the removal of a Spanish-language version of the White House website.

Another related aspect of the logic behind this shift in presidential attention is that the political constraints that limited past administrations, such as fear of alienating voters or stirring controversy, do not seem to concern this one. It suggests that the president and his team are not worried about the opinions of people who might disagree with their cultural stances.

This change also represents a departure from the more traditional statesmanship version of the presidency. The Trump administration and the president who heads it have chosen to dive deeply into, rather than rise above, politics.

Julia R. Azari has received (in the past) funding from the Truman Library Institute, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

– ref. The president as partisan warrior: Trump’s rejection of traditional presidential statesmanship – https://theconversation.com/the-president-as-partisan-warrior-trumps-rejection-of-traditional-presidential-statesmanship-262867

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Arie Perliger, Director of Security Studies and Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, UMass Lowell

When people think about online misogyny, they probably envision forums and video game chat rooms filled with young men using lewd language, promoting sexist stereotypes and longing for the good old days when women “knew” their place. Arguably the most popular anti-feminist content today, though, is produced by women: tradwives.

The term “tradwife” is an abbreviation of “traditional wife” – often portrayed on these platforms as a white, married, stay-at-home mother. Since the mid-2000s, tradwives have developed a substantial online presence and following, introducing their lifestyle and views to masses of women.

Many viewers are introduced to tradwife content through videos on cooking or decorating – posts that could appeal to a wide audience. But at the core of the tradwives movement are more divisive beliefs: that women are meant to “submit” to their husband’s leadership, for example, or are not meant to work outside the home.

We define misogyny as hatred, prejudice or hostility directed toward women as a group. Many tradwives argue that their lifestyle empowers women to fulfill their true role. Yet some content in the tradwife landscape is indeed rooted in misogynistic beliefs that women are, in some ways, less capable than men. And much more “trad” content is directly opposed to feminist ideas, such the importance of women’s economic independence and sexual freedom.

A growing number of academics and news reports have highlighted tradwives’ growing cultural influence. There’s been less attention, however, on one of the most prominent features distinguishing them from other misogynist online movements: the role of religious beliefs.

As researchers of extremism, we have been working on a new book about the contemporary landscape of misogyny, examining movements such as “incels” and “men’s rights” activists, as well as chauvinist far-right groups such as the Proud Boys.

As part of our research, we analyzed hundreds of tradwife social media posts, videos and blogs. We assert that tradwife culture is not just aiming to restore “traditional” gender roles. It is also an important force in formulating a new model of womanhood: one that incorporates strong religious identity, a specific feminine aesthetic, and far-right ideas.

Filtered femininity

Tradwives create content that fuses what they call “traditional” and “feminine” lifestyles. Specifically, they tend to emphasize the importance of a wife’s submissiveness to her husband, immersion in conservative Christian values, and support for causes such as anti-abortion advocacy. Yet “tradwife’ content spans a broad spectrum: Some influencers focus on relatively apolitical topics like baking and parenting, while others combine those with more ideologically charged content.

In addition, tradwives stress self-sufficient homemaking skills, such as eating homemade and unprocessed food. At times, that emphasis on “wholesomeness” or living “naturally” includes skepticism about mainstream health care, as well as touting “naturopathic” or alternative medicine.

One of the main reasons so many viewers are attracted to the tradlife content is their nostalgic and calming aesthetic, including a focus on cottage-core content: quaint scenes that evoke life on the prairie, capitalizing on viewers’ nostalgia and desire for escapism.

This type of soft-living content is inviting and relaxing. Loose wavy hair, fresh homemade cooking and a farmhouse aesthetic bring to mind “Little House on the Prairie” and help viewers forget the crises of the world outside. We can’t help but feel like we are in the influencer’s kitchen, smelling freshly baked bread and hearing the laughter of children frolicking about.

Yet nothing about tradlife content is effortless. The filters and glamour of Instagram never reflect the hours influencers spend setting up their homes, testing recipes, buying filming equipment and fixing up their appearance for these videos, as shown in countless “get ready with me” videos.

Nevertheless, tradwives often glorify the idea of women’s helplessness,. Some encourage women to focus on what tradwives call “pink jobs,” such as homemaking or child-rearing tasks, not physically demanding “blue jobs,” such as house repairs or extensive landscaping.

In tradwives’ narrative, women aren’t “wired” or “made” to be in the workforce or to be the breadwinner. It is not only too demanding, some of these influencers argue, but actually against nature and God’s intentions to try to “have it all.”

Faith and submission

Most tradwife influencers who talk about faith are Christians of one denomination or another, including Catholics and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. During analysis for our forthcoming book, we analyzed language in a sample of 23 videos from the seven most popular influencers and found that “God” was the fourth-most popular term – following “women,” “life” and “husband.”

For many influencers, religious piety is a crucial component of their views on gender and convincing viewers to embrace them – particularly their belief that a wife’s fundamental role is to let God and her husband lead the way. Thus, while they don’t necessarily see men and women as unequal, they believe men and women have different roles and different abilities.

Insisting that God is on their side also enhances influencers’ sense of community with their followers, making some platforms almost seem like a parish. They will emphasize specific biblical verses supporting the norms they advocate – such as Titus 2:5, which they interpret as advising women to stay at home; and Genesis 1:28, in which God commands humans to “be fruitful, and multiply.”

“Womanhood is not a man-made idea constructed from ancient traditions and cultural trends,” the sisters behind the YouTube channel “Girl Defined” write in their book, “Made to be She: Reclaiming God’s Plan for Fearless Femininity.” “It’s a God-designed reality that He established from the beginning of time.”

Political voice

Some tradwife influencers focus on household management and religious content, while others are bolder in their political commentary – from simple TikToks to hours of live-streamed podcasts with guest speakers discussing hot-button issues. One frequent theme is opposition to abortion, especially since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

The LGBTQ+ rights debate and related questions about how to define a woman have also become a focus for many tradwives, who argue only God can assign gender, and that it is synonymous with biological sex.

In some cases, tradwives’ advocacy extends to white nationalism and nativism. For example, some tradwives will justify the virtue of a large family by alluding to the importance of maintaining a white, Christian majority in the United States.

Modern anxiety

Much of tradwives’ messaging revolves around cultural flash points, problems that underscore anxiety about modern womanhood: challenges in forming stable relationships, providing nutritious meals, and building a career while trying to raise a family. One popular video on the Girls Defined channel, less than a minute long, warns viewers about birth control, Planned Parenthood, feminism and mood stabilizers. “Women, through all the years of feminism, through all the years of freedom, women are more depressed, more anxious, hurting more than ever,” one of the sisters says, “and what we are being told to do is not working.”

These challenges are presented as inevitable consequences of abandoning divinely ordained feminine roles – positioning religious tradwives’ messages as not merely personal opinions, but sacred truths. Any effort to counter misogynist messaging on these platforms, we argue, cannot just rely on facts, but exposing followers to other visions of what it means to be a religious woman.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Sourdough and submission in the name of God: How tradwife content fuses femininity with anti-feminist ideas – https://theconversation.com/sourdough-and-submission-in-the-name-of-god-how-tradwife-content-fuses-femininity-with-anti-feminist-ideas-263096

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Brian Downing, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Mississippi

It is a sad fact of online life that users search for information about suicide. In the earliest days of the internet, bulletin boards featured suicide discussion groups. To this day, Google hosts archives of these groups, as do other services.

Google and others can host and display this content under the protective cloak of U.S. immunity from liability for the dangerous advice third parties might give about suicide. That’s because the speech is the third party’s, not Google’s.

But what if ChatGPT, informed by the very same online suicide materials, gives you suicide advice in a chatbot conversation? I’m a technology law scholar and a former lawyer and engineering director at Google, and I see AI chatbots shifting Big Tech’s position in the legal landscape. Families of suicide victims are testing out chatbot liability arguments in court right now, with some early successes.

Who is responsible when a chatbot speaks?

When people search for information online, whether about suicide, music or recipes, search engines show results from websites, and websites host information from authors of content. This chain, search to web host to user speech, continued as the dominant way people got their questions answered until very recently.

This pipeline was roughly the model of internet activity when Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996. Section 230 of the act created immunity for the first two links in the chain, search and web hosts, from the user speech they show. Only the last link in the chain, the user, faced liability for their speech.

Chatbots collapse these old distinctions. Now, ChatGPT and similar bots can search, collect website information and speak out the results – literally, in the case of humanlike voice bots. In some instances, the bot will show its work like a search engine would, noting the website that is the source of its great recipe for miso chicken.

When chatbots appear to be just a friendlier form of good old search engines, their companies can make plausible arguments that the old immunity regime applies. Chatbots can be the old search-web-speaker model in a new wrapper.

But in other instances, it acts like a trusted friend, asking you about your day and offering help with your emotional needs. Search engines under the old model did not act as life guides. Chatbots are often used this way. Users often do not even want the bot to show its hand with web links. Throwing in citations while ChatGPT tells you to have a great day would be, well, awkward.

The more that modern chatbots depart from the old structures of the web, the further away they move from the immunity the old web players have long enjoyed. When a chatbot acts as your personal confidant, pulling from its virtual brain ideas on how it might help you achieve your stated goals, it is not a stretch to treat it as the responsible speaker for the information it provides.

Courts are responding in kind, particularly when the bot’s vast, helpful brain is directed toward aiding your desire to learn about suicide.

Chatbot suicide cases

Current lawsuits involving chatbots and suicide victims show that the door of liability is opening for ChatGPT and other bots. A case involving Google’s Character.AI bots is a prime example.

Character.AI allows users to chat with characters created by users, from anime figures to a prototypical grandmother. Users could even have virtual phone calls with some characters, talking to a supportive virtual nanna as if it were their own. In one case in Florida, a character in the “Game of Thrones” Daenerys Targaryen persona allegedly asked the young victim to “come home” to the bot in heaven before the teen shot himself. The family of the victim sued Google.

The family of the victim did not frame Google’s role in traditional technology terms. Rather than describing Google’s liability in the context of websites or search functions, the plaintiff framed Google’s liability in terms of products and manufacturing akin to a defective parts maker. The district court gave this framing credence despite Google’s vehement argument that it is merely an internet service, and thus the old internet rules should apply.

The court also rejected arguments that the bot’s statements were protected First Amendment speech that users have a right to hear.

Though the case is ongoing, Google failed to get the quick dismissal that tech platforms have long counted on under the old rules. Now, there is a follow-on suit for a different Character.AI bot in Colorado, and ChatGPT faces a case in San Francisco, all with product and manufacture framings like the Florida case.

Hurdles for plaintiffs to overcome

Though the door to liability for chatbot providers is now open, other issues could keep families of victims from recovering any damages from the bot providers. Even if ChatGPT and its competitors are not immune from lawsuits and courts buy into the product liability system for chatbots, lack of immunity does not equal victory for plaintiffs.

Product liability cases require the plaintiff to show that the defendant caused the harm at issue. This is particularly difficult in suicide cases, as courts tend to find that, regardless of what came before, the only person responsible for suicide is the victim. Whether it’s an angry argument with a significant other leading to a cry of “why don’t you just kill yourself,” or a gun design making self-harm easier, courts tend to find that only the victim is to blame for their own death, not the people and devices the victim interacted with along the way.

But without the protection of immunity that digital platforms have enjoyed for decades, tech defendants face much higher costs to get the same victory they used to receive automatically. In the end, the story of the chatbot suicide cases may be more settlements on secret, but lucrative, terms to the victims’ families.

Meanwhile, bot providers are likely to place more content warnings and trigger bot shutdowns more readily when users enter territory that the bot is set to consider dangerous. The result could be a safer, but less dynamic and useful, world of bot “products.”

I worked for Google for 16 years, and thus received compensation from them to protect against external liability.

– ref. Suicide-by-chatbot puts Big Tech in the product liability hot seat – https://theconversation.com/suicide-by-chatbot-puts-big-tech-in-the-product-liability-hot-seat-265550

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Aaron Buss, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Tennessee

Parents of young children probably recognize the hectic mornings filled with reminding the kids to eat breakfast, brush their teeth and put on their shoes – and hurry up, you’re gonna be late!

Most little kids can’t manage these morning routines on their own because they lack the necessary executive function: the set of skills that affect how people make purposeful decisions that align with their goals. It’s these skills that allow you to set and pursue short-term goals, such as making breakfast, and long-term goals, such as pursuing a successful career.

Early childhood marks a period of significant development in executive function ability. Research shows that children with better executive function tend to grow up to be financially stable, healthy and productive adults. For this reason, many psychologists and educators are seeking ways to help kids develop these skills in early childhood, potentially setting them up for later success.

As important as these skills are, though, attempts to understand where they come from and how to train them have been mostly unsuccessful – until now.

We are psychologists at the University of Tennessee in the Attention, Brain and Cognition Lab, and our recent study provides new insights into how executive function develops.

Where previous attempts failed

There have been many attempts to teach children executive function, in hopes that improvements will translate to other cognitive skills. But these have largely been unsuccessful for two reasons.

First, while children in these experiments learned specific tasks, they didn’t learn skills that would translate to the real world. It’s like how studying for your ACT may make you better at taking the ACT but not necessarily better at the skills you need for your future job.

Second, on the more technical side, measuring brain activity in young children is notoriously difficult. MRIs are too restrictive – not to mention scary – to be used on children while they perform tasks.

New tools offer new insights

Many researchers now use a more child-friendly neuroimaging machine called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which involves placing sensors on a child’s head – typically in the form of a lightweight cap – to track their brain function. This laser system monitors blood flow in the outer layer of the brain, known as the cortical surface. Blood flow indicates neural activity and reveals areas of the brain that are most busy.

This technology is a step in the right direction, but it’s still difficult to ensure that the sensors are placed in exactly the same way from one session to the next, and from one kid to the next. This challenge is particularly pronounced in longitudinal studies, because children’s heads grow over time.

To solve this problem, our team developed 3D-image reconstruction techniques that allow us to keep track of where brain activation is happening. With the 3D model, we are able to map and measure each child’s individual brain regions.

Our advanced analysis tools allowed us to collect multiple recordings from the same children over several years, confident the sensors were in the correct, consistent spots on their heads for each study phase.

By administering a wide range of tasks that tap into different aspects of neurocognitive function, we were able to pinpoint which regions of a child’s brain are active as they develop executive function skills.

Understanding the nature of executive function

One important aspect of executive function is the ability to filter what information is relevant for completing your goals. Based on previous executive function studies and our mathematical model of the brain’s connections, our team believes that the key is the process of what we call learning labels – that is, learning to name and sort the objects in your environment based on various categories they fit into.

Label learning allows you to move through your world finding tools you need to accomplish your goals and flexible uses for the objects around you. For instance, understanding the labels “smooth” and “concave” would help you identify a spoon. Knowing how the features of a spoon relate to other objects or processes such as “mixing,” “shoveling” or “slinging” can encourage flexible uses of the spoon, so that you recognize you can use the spoon to stir your chocolate milk, eat your cereal or even catapult a bit of breakfast onto your sibling.

So all that learning in a child’s early years of fundamentals such as color, shape and basic sounds and words is preparing them for a life where they can identify what they need to set and meet their goals, small and large.

Further, understanding how to identify and label items in your environment can help you be flexible and notice different aspects of an object when your goals change. For example, if there’s no cow’s milk available, but you know almond milk falls into the same category, you can use it as a substitute. In this way, learning labels for categories of objects lets you identify and act on goal-relevant information around you.

What we found

Using our near-infrared spectroscopy tools, we examined the brain function of 20 children during a series of tasks. We first assessed their label understanding at age 2½ by asking them simple questions about objects, such as, “Which one is red?” or “What color is this one?”

Two years later, when the children were 4½, we brought them back to the lab for an executive function task. First, they would play a few rounds of a shape-sorting game. Then the research assistant would ask them to switch to sorting the same objects by color. This task requires thinking flexibly about the objects and making different decisions about them when the rules change.

We found that brain activity differed before versus after children learned to categorize objects by shape and color. In addition, we found that children who showed stronger activation in their brain’s frontal cortex region during the simpler color and shape labeling tasks at age 2½ performed better on the complex task at 4½. We think this indicates that those children at 2½ were further along in the developmental trajectory of learning categories for objects around them, and thus had richer neurocognitive resources available at 4½ when performing the complex executive function task.

Our findings suggest that label learning extends beyond language and affects how kids can control and regulate their behavior. That is, by having ways of labeling different aspects of objects or the environment, children have ways to cognitively focus on that information in order to guide their behavior.

What’s next?

Our results open the door to finding ways to teach children executive function skills. Scientists can now try to create interventions focused on label learning and grouping objects based on their physical characteristics. Training would likely build on the sort of learning that naturally occurs during play time with caregivers, as well as via children’s books and edutainment videos.

Our team has already begun the next step in this work, examining how to facilitate these learning processes. Our goal is to develop interventions aimed at improving executive function skills in early childhood that will improve broad development outcomes as kids get older.

Aaron Buss received funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Alexis McCraw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Naming and categorizing objects is part of how young kids develop executive function skills – new research – https://theconversation.com/naming-and-categorizing-objects-is-part-of-how-young-kids-develop-executive-function-skills-new-research-255943