Remember playing "Simon Says" when you were a kid? The leader gives commands to the followers-- "hands on your head", "step back two steps", "hold your nose". According to the rules of the game, the followers obey only if the leader has said "Simon says" first-- just the order, without "Simon says" is NOT to be obeyed. If a follower puts hands on head when "Simon" hasn't said so, he or she is "out". Same thing if the child fails to obey the command when "Simon" has said so.
"Simon Says" is surprisingly hard for children, and even adults find they have to pay careful attention in order to stay in the game. Why? Because although it's easy to obey simple commands, this game requires the player to choose to obey or disobey on the basis of a memory of what was said before the command. The player must listen to the command, remember it, search memory for whether "Simon says" was heard right before this command, decide whether obedience or disobedience is required, and then act or refrain from acting. If the player was inattentive at the beginning of the command statement, he or she will not be sure about the right choice (although chances are about 50-50 that a guess will be right). And, of course, if the player cannot inhibit the impulse to act, he or she will put hands on head even while knowing that "Simon" did not say to do it this time.
Do the skills involved in "Simon Says" apply in any other tasks that children or adults do? There are some obvious situations in which people have to decide what to do on the basis of some information received immediately before. For example, crossing a busy street requires a decision about whether there are cars coming or not. We look at approaching cars, wait if they are too near, and walk if there are none approaching quickly. We need to be able to inhibit that impulse to step right out into the street when we are tired of waiting. But how about more complicated decisions? Are academic skills related to making decisions and inhibiting impulses to act?
Some games similar to "Simon Says" have been used to investigate this question. A recent article in the journal "Developmental Psychology" (Claire Ponitz et al. , May 2009, Vol. 45 (3), pp. 605-619) reported research on the connection between children's developing math skills and their ability to play a game with some interesting rules. In this game, "Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders", the children sometimes had to remember to do the opposite of what they were told to do. For instance, if they were told to touch their toes, they had to touch their heads instead. (Although some parents might sigh that their children often do the opposite of what they are told, this is really not easy for children in the lower grades.) Choosing to do the opposite is a complicated task that involves memory, identification of the command, inhibition of the impulse to obey the command, identification of the signal that the opposite is required, and the action itself. In Ponitz's study, children entering kindergarten were tested on math skills and other skills like vocabulary, and were tested on their ability to do "Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders."
The entering kindergarteners who were good at doing the opposite task were also the ones who made most gains in their math skills in the course of their kindergarten year. However, this skill did not predict what their gains in other areas would be. This is not really surprising when you think about the tasks necessary for doing even very simple math, such as remembering the order in which numbers appear and keeping in mind which number words mean large amounts and which mean small amounts. Number words refer to abstract characteristics that can apply to many kinds of objects, not to the objects themselves; there can be five girls, five ice cream cones, or five blue jays, and those groups share the number but no other characteristics. Children doing simple quantitative tasks have to inhibit the impulse to react to the things themselves, as they would in other circumstances (such as eating the ice cream rather than counting cones). They need to choose which task to do, just as they do in playing "Simon Says".
The importance of controlling impulses and choosing what to do probably increases as children get to higher grades. Who doesn't remember the annoyance of rushing through a page of problems, adding each one, only to realize at the end that some were addition and some subtraction? As children master more arithmetical operations, they have a more and more difficult task choosing which operation to do and inhibiting all the others for the time being. They need to have their own internal "Simon" who reminds them, "Simon says, don't subtract, add these."
[Because there were some inappropriate comments not long ago, I regret to say that I will have to block comments to this post.]
