#its not like developmentally unusual for adults to have things they do separately but in the same room/environment/etc even silently

[thursdayglrl]

I think it's funny that people took the word "parallel play" and declared its a neurodivergent thing. no it's a child development thing I'm pretty sure most adults understand the concept of "comfortable silence" and "wanting company while I do things, but not necessarily wanting to talk'

[withinthescripts]

Season 2, Cassette 5: Van Gogh Museum (1977)

Hey there, lovers of wires and all things within. Jeffrey Cranor here with a really exciting thing to tell you. We have brand new Within the Wires shirts designed by the inimitable Rob Wilson in our Topatoco Store. And, I’m really excited for this too: an art print by Claudia Atieno, created by real life artist Jessica Hayworth. Even if you don’t wanna buy it, go to withinthewires.com and click on “shirts and posters” to see the breathtaking painting “Child with Damselfly by Claudia Atieno. Oh god, it’s so beautiful! Again, go to withinthewires.com and click on “shirts and posters.”

http://www.nightvalepresents.com/withinthewires#store

And now, an audio guide of the Van Gogh Museum, 1977.

[tape recorder turns on]

Welcome to the Van Gogh museum. I am Zoe Bakker, director of curation. Over the past two years, we have been exploring the early lives of some of the 20th century most influential artists. Our current exhibition shows the childhood paintings, sketches, and diaries of Claudia Atieno. As part of this ongoing series, we have often have the artist featured comment on their juvenile work, but in the case of Atieno, that is not possible. Atieno has not been seen now for some years, and while we may never know what happened to her, at this distance of time it seems unlikely that she is still living. The Van Gogh Museum, along with the wider artistic community, deeply mourns the loss of such an impactful and important voice. As we can’t get comment from the artist herself, we have approached her contemporary and close personal friend, Roimata Mangakāhia, to provide insights to the childhood work of Claudia Atieno. The exhibit is in the ground floor of the exhibition wing. Follow the numbered signs and press play whenever you see an audio guide placard, and pause after each tone you hear. We hope you enjoy your visit to the Van Gogh Museum.

[bell chimes]

It is always interesting to contemplate the art of a child who was destined to become truly vital. Surely there are key developmental differences between the great artist and the ordinary. Whether it be they’re drawing stick figures with arms coming out of their torsos or having the imagination to give their stick figures a pet elephant instead of a dog. However, it’s debatable how much we can really learn from this. We must always be aware that no amount of developmentally advanced childhood scribbles can truly take the place of the years of hard work and dedication it takes to develop true skill, and a genuine artistic voice. Brilliance is not innate, nor is it taught. Brilliance is rote, it is tedium, it is practice. You must enjoy what you do or at least tolerate it in order to become great.

Here we will examine Claudia Atieno’s childhood, and we may be impressed at her early skill. But it’s important to remember that many children show aptitudes that they do not develop further. Atieno’s childhood work may indeed be remarkable, but it’s likely remarkable for reasons other than artistic merit.

First, it’s remarkable that these sketchbooks and paintings survived at all. Born towards the end of the decades long Great Reckoning, Claudia grew up as the world around her was being completely reshaped. As more than a quarter of the world’s population was decimated through war, famine, and cataclysmic natural forces. She was of the last generation to be raised by her parents along with her siblings, and although a process was devised to separate this generation’s ideologies and prejudices from those of their parents, they were not made to forget them, as would be true of children later, such as me and likely you too.

Through these early works it’s possible to divine something of what it was like for these transitional generations, to have your existence change so dramatically. And to know that those who came after you would never experience a life like the one you had. Humanity’s survival is predicated on its self-governance, and the new society has protected us from even greater reckonings.

While we can learn and observe certain things about Claudia the child and Claudia the teenager and make guesses from them on Claudia as an adult, whether there is anything to learn about Claudia the artist is up for debate. And surely there’s little to gather about where she is today. Honestly, I fear the worst. Claudia’s mother kept much of her childhood work, everything from finger paintings done as an infant to the charcoal portraits of pre-adolescence, so we have a comprehensive view of how her art progressed up to age 12. Perhaps more comprehensive than we really need it to be. Work from Claudia’s adolescence, after she was moved to the New Society Programming Center, however, is more scarce. I would like to be able to tell you exactly why this is, but in truth I do not know. It’s possible Claudia simply drew and painted less after she left her family. It’s possible the Center was less committed to keeping the work of its wards, indeed with 30 or so children to care for it’s understandable if more childhood relics slipped through the cracks. It’s possible also that Claudia herself started discarding some of her own work. She was old enough by this point to be more discerning about what was worth keeping. But there’s little point in speculating other works we cannot see, while we have plenty to talk about before our eyes.

[bell chimes]

One. “Childhood Home”, 1935.

Look closely at the standard box structure of the home. Brown walls, windows, and a yellow front door. There is a chimney stuck on top and clouds above. If you have seen Atieno’s “House with Yellow Door” painted in her adulthood, you may recognize this picture. I might even consider this drawing an early study of the later masterwork. Represented here as a style of childhood drawing that is no longer commonly seen, but was once incredibly popular. The drawings, crudely done obviously by children of roughly five or six, would feature a simple house standing alone on a flat green line. There would be a door, couple of windows, a chimney often putting forth smoke, although invariably the scene depicted would be a nice day with the sun beaming from the sky, as shown by a single line of blue. Beside the house would stand several figures. Two taller and at least one, [chuckles] the artist, smaller. Children were drawing their families and would include however many siblings they happened to have. And any family pets. Nowadays, these once common drawings have been replaced. The houses by the larger more functional clinic buildings where children are raised and the families by teams of caretakers. Atieno herself painted and sketched several of these old-fashioned pictures as a child. There is much you can gleam from them yourself, of course, as they are displayed.

[softly] Look here. She drew the sky as blue and the ground as green. But the sky is not a simple line far above our heads, but rather an all-encompassing atmosphere. Notice where her simple crude pictures develops a horizon. Look at the family dog, standing in the lower right of this drawing. Notice she’s drawn two horizontal black lines for the dog’s eyes. Do dogs sleep while standing?

It’s tempting to look at these early drawings and paintings and see depth and skill that isn’t there. After all, we know what Claudia would go on to accomplish. But in truth, there’s not much to distinguish them from the work of any other child with a modicum of artistic talent. These are borderline finger paintings, there’s no fire or inspiration, or even an unusual amount of imagination. She drew her house, it’s historically interesting, that’s all. The same drawings have been made time and again by children across the globe. Knowing Claudia, she probably looked at what other kids are drawing and just drew that. But we must not judge too harshly. After all, she was only a child.

[bell chimes]

Two, “Childhood Home, Left”.

By the time Claudia was removed to the Programming Center, of course she was 13, so her style is more sophisticated, although she had yet to develop real skill. Still, the house in the painting is recognizable as the actual house that she had left behind.

[softly] Notice her use of watercolors, finding out how to layer paint to create wood-like texture on the ashen siding. The house is yellow as you can see, the woodwork is clear, the space around it is built with the swing set and bicycles we know the family had.

Pay attention. The absence of the family dog, where did it go? Where did you go? Are you no longer some place you once were? Can you notice a thing that is not there?

This painting would have been made about seven years after the previous, so it’s possible the dog died. But it’s also a significant reminder of the memories programmed out of children. It’s difficult to say whether the dog died or – just the memory of it.

The family themselves stands collected just outside the house. Claudia herself is absent, however. Perhaps this implies that it’s a picture of the house she (pictured) her home after she’d left it. It’s an inaccurate picture, of course, as her brothers and sisters were also removed, taken to other centers, and her father and mother were left there alone. So perhaps this is how she thought of her family, anachronistically reunited in her absence, together still in their happy life, with her alone removed from it.

[bell chimes] [tape recorder turns off] [ads] [tape recorder turns on] [bell chimes]

Three. “New Environment”.

This is a collection of 12 tiny drawings depicting areas of the Programming Center where Claudia spent her adolescence. There’s a theme of personal distance in much of the work Claudia created while she was at the center. She followed up her melancholic look back at the home that was once was hers with a closest thing to a home that she would have for some years.

Some of the pictures are outside the courtyards and gardens. Some in the dedicated recreation spaces. Some in the dining rooms, and a couple in the dormatories.

Each drawing shows a collection of children with caretakers hovering around them. Sometimes the children are playing a group game together. In one they seem to be chasing after a ball of some kind, in one they are skipping ropes. Sometimes they are working quietly. Sometimes they are eating. Et cetera.

Look at the 12 picture grid, starting on the top row, going from left to right. Think of these as a chronological order of a day. First, see the relaxation exercises in the garden. See the children, eyes closed and breathing, their hands on their knees. Look at the next two drawings of the dining hall as children eating breakfast, and then later, receive instructions over the loudspeakers. Look at the children’s rapt attention to the sound, look at their eyes. Are they attentive or distant?

[softly] Are you attentive? How do you know? How far away are you? Do you mean that figuratively?

In the next few pictures we see in order, classroom education and isolation room and physical education. The last one on the top row, look at the children running. It looks like two of them are holding hands. This is possibly just the angle of the drawing, but I believe Claudia was suggesting young romance, particularly in an environment that forbade it.

Along the bottom row, you will see a picture of lunch. Nothing exciting there. Then a picture of musical lessons. The children gathered around a piano, their eyes covered with towels as an instructor plays a tune.

The next two images are of tactile retraining. Notice the wires running up each child’s arm. You probably remember these from your own programming center. Even in Atieno’s time, tactile retraining was unpleasant, but probably the most valuable skills we learned.

And the last three images are simply children speaking to one another, during class breaks, in the garden.

[softly] Look at the way the children in the last picture are huddled close to one another. Notice the similarities in features between these two and the two running in the earlier drawing. Are they leaning into whispers and secrets, about themselves, about someone else? Are their knees touching? As an adolescent, did you ever let your knees touch another’s?

Each of these pictures include Atieno, but she’s never included in activity, she’s always off to the side. You can see her. [chuckles] Look for the long braids, the small figure and sharp shoulders. That girl could not easily be mistaken for anyone other than Claudia. She was – is- a distinct-looking woman, beautiful and robust. She drew herself well. Many people at this age either fantasize a greater or lesser version of themselves. Claudia always knew what she looked like.

Atieno’s absence from these images might suggest she never engaged much with the rest of the children, or perhaps this is an attempt to communicate how she felt, to show the world the loneliness no one seemed to see.

[soft, nearly whispering] And what of the two girls running together, holding hands? Speaking in covert breathlessness in the garden. One of the girls has similar hair to Claudia, but is larger in build. Who were these girls, friends? Perhaps girls Claudia wanted to be friends with? A jealousy? Or just more likely just a fascination in their gestures, the attractiveness of their form as they gossiped or jogged.

There is one of these pictures that is even more notable than the two girls. It’s on the second row, second from the right. Look at the garden with the main building behind and to the left. Children are running around, there’s a collection of hoops among them and they appear to be changing them but - in no particular direction. Claudia stands in the midst of the group, slightly to the right of the center. She’s in the middle of the action but somehow removed from it. Rather than watching the game, she stares out of the painting at the viewer. Her face is expressionless and her arms hang by her sides.

Do you see her? Does she see you?

You see the young artist grasp the concept of the viewer, the patron. She looks skeptical, distrustful. This picture isn’t about children playing hoops, it’s about your response to it.

Is she trying to intimidate us? Do you feel challenged to enjoy or critique this work? Do you feel your concept grasped by the artist? Do you have a response? It is this drawing that perhaps gives the first, and possibly the only, glimpse we get to the adolescent Claudia. And she would go on to be an important artist.

[bell chimes]

Four, “Self-Portrait, Sketchbook”.

This exhibition includes a sketchbook kept by Claudia during her final years at the center, before she went on to travel and study all over the world, all drawings done between the ages of 16 and 18. The sketches are varied and mostly unfinished. (--) [0:20:31] details done for practice, ideas marked out to be expanded elsewhere. There are disembodied eyes, armless hands, there are figures shot through with lines marking out proportions, there are themeless indistinct doodles. It is entirely a collection of self-portraits in different stages of completion, of scope, of examination.

Claudia did not do many self-portraits as an adult and a working artist, she did not care for them, and did not care to explain why. But it’s clear that as a teenager, her feelings were different. There are three self-portraits in this sketchbook that are worth considering. The first is on page 10, a simple plain pencil sketch. It’s accomplished and a good likeness. There is energy to her face although there is not a strong expression.

She told me once that she used to find moths and flies in the garden around the programming center. She would take those insects and pin them down and study them. She would look at them closely, studying their complex eyes, hairy twitching legs. She wouldn’t kill the damselflies, but she would tear their wings from them and set them back down, watching them crawl away. She would hold the wings like a microscopic stained glass window up to the sun and then blow them out to the wind, as if they were seed pods that could land upon a spot of fertile earth and grow again.

I asked her why children did such mean things, but she did not think it mean at all. “I still do it from time to time, Roimata,” she told me, and she had a disaffected half-grin as she said it. it was determined but completely without meaning. The face in this sketch, this was the face she made.

The second self-portrait is on page 13, done in pastels and much more fantastical. She has rendered her brown skin in reds and blues and gives her green irises a sheen of yellow. Her dark hair seems almost alive with color. It is a style she had (cripped) [0:22:47] from a children’s book called, [chuckles] that she had had since leaving her home. It is a strong imitation.

The third self-portrait is a pen and ink drawing on the back cover of the sketchbook, with black ink sinking into the pale green of the book’s cardboard cover. The portrait shows the left half of Claudia’s face, whole and impassive. But the right half has shattered away.

Notice how her right eye looks right at you, while the cheek below it is gone. See the jagged edge that cuts down from her right temple to her chin. Did you just touch your own cheek as you looked at this? Why?

Have you ever imitated an idea? Did you feel bad about it?

This portrait is strikingly similar to the self-portrait by (Amei Layeni), which currently hangs in LA County Museum in Los Angeles, North America. Layeni was of a larger build with a rounder face and no glasses. But her hair was similar to Atieno’s. Layeni’s portrait was unveiled when Claudia was in her early 20’s. The two were almost the same age. Once Claudia commented to me on how much she loved Layeni’s self-portrait, and how much she wanted to see Amei again. How she missed Amei.

I said, “I didn’t know you two knew each other.” I asked when was the last time she saw her, but Claudia replied: “I can’t say.” And I wasn’t sure if she meant she didn’t know, or wasn’t allowed to. She did not tell me of the sketch at the time, she did not mention which center she had grown up in, she did not tell me who else had been there.

[tape recorder turns off]

Within the Wires is written by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson and performed by Rima Te Wiata, with original music by Mary Epworth. Find more of Mary’s music at maryepworth.com.

The voice of Zoe Bakker was Lia Albers.

Within the Wires is a production of Night Vale Presents. Another of our podcasts I think you’d love is “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats”. Welcome to Night Vale’s Joseph Fink talks with the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle about music, art, politics and the responsibilities of being a creator. I know very little about the Mountain Goats or music in general, but this podcast is smart and funny and they made a reference to both Bertol Brecht and (--) [0:25:55] in the newest episode, and I actually did a happy little skip, in public. Go listen now to “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats” at nightvalepresents.com.

OK, our time is done. It’s you time now. Time to stop by the museum gift shop, grab yourself a souvenir book of paintings about [Houston Astros – José Altuve], pick up a poster featuring [Houston Astros – José Altuve], and buy a commemorative vase made out of [iced tea].

[ameliabaggs]

Embarrassing admission:  I’m a savant.  Stick with me and I’ll explain, but it’ll take awhile.

Understand that I’m not saying this to brag.  This is not easy for me to admit to myself, let alone anybody else.  It’s taken me over a year to write this.It’s actually as difficult for me to discuss this as it is for me to discuss the fact that I actually have coprolalic vocal tics.  In fact autistic people’s discussions of savant skills often resemble Touretters’ discussion of coprolalia:  There’s a tendency to try to make out like they’re much rarer than they are.  

About 10% of Touretters are thought to have coprolalia, that is vocal tics that sometimes involve involve swearing or other offensive words (like slurs).  It’s embarrassing to Touretters as a whole because to a lot of people Tourette’s is like a punchline to a joke about cussing.  Similarly, about 10% of autistic people are thought to have savant skills (I suspect the number is higher), and autistic people are just as embarrassed by the fact that savant skills have become a stereotype.  10% is one in ten people. That’s not actually the tiny minority that people would have you think it is.  And I do believe savant skills are under-reported for reasons I’ll get into later.

Some background about myself

I was first recognized as being autistic at the age of fourteen.  I was in a mental institution following a suicide attempt, at the psychiatrist I got was randomly assigned.  In other words, he had no reason to be specifically looking for or expecting autism when I first became his patient.  I would remain his patient until his retirement and subsequent death in my twenties.

Anyway, after he met me, he asked to meet with my parents.  My mother describes him interviewing her extensively about my early development, asking pointed questions about certain things.  She said he very quickly said of me, “Your daughter sounds like an idiot savant.”

A note on terminology

Idiot savant sounds outdated or downright rude, depending on your take on things.  Even in 1995 when this was taking place.  To understand what he was saying, you have to understand the history of terminology around savant skills as well as his own personal history.

So first off -- my doctor was old.  He was trained and did his residency at a time when Southern mental institutions were still fully and officially segregated by race.  His age and specialty in child psychiatry meant that he had met a lot of children over the years, including a lot of autistic children.  It also meant that he used a lot of terminology that would at best be considered quite old-fashioned today, because he learned his clinical vocabulary in probably the early sixties.

Idiot savant does not mean a specific type of savant.  It has nothing to do with the outdated classification of idiot which usually meant what today would be referred to as a severe and/or profound intellectual disability.  There was never an IQ cutoff for being an idiot savant.  Idiot savant meant “wise idiot” and was meant to cover the unevenness of cognitive skills that was characteristic of cognitively disabled people with savant skills.

So him saying I was an “idiot savant” would be the same way that someone today would say “Your daughter has savant syndrome.”  He was not making a judgement about my IQ, which at the time had only tested as high, at the age of five, largely due to the effects of hyperlexia, a learning disability involving early reading ability usually combined with comprehension issues, that is in some contexts itself considered a form of savant skill.

People talked about idiot savants, and then it became autistic savants (except that this term would only be applied to autistic people, who are not the only people with savant skills), and these days it’s savant syndrome. You don’t need a cognitive impairment of any kind (such as autism or intellectual disability) to be a savant:  There are a lot of blind savants, for instance.  Today people mostly just say savant or savant syndrome.  

But definitely understand that idiot savant was its own term, separate from both low IQ/intellectual disability in general and the classification of idiot in particular. In fact, very few people identified as savants throughout history, including when the term idiot savant existed, have ever fallen into the official classification of idiot or any of the terms that replaced it.  

The confusion people have about the technical term idiot savant (mistakenly relating it to idiot in particular or intellectual disability in general) is very similar to the confusion over the term psychomotor retardation.  Psychomotor retardation refers to a mental and physical slowing associated with certain medication side effects as well as a number of conditions such as depression.  It has absolutely nothing to do with the category called mental retardation, a recent but now outdated term for intellectual disability.  They both have the word retardation in them because it means slow, but they refer to entirely different types of (purported) slowness.

Back to my own history

So he called me an idiot savant before he even used the word autistic to describe me.  Both words came up in the first few sentences of that conversation, but idiot savant was the term that came up first.  Savant skills were the first unusual thing he recognized in me.  Within a month, after further interviews, conversations, interaction, observation, and formal testing, as well as consultation with a team of psychiatric and neurologic professionals, he diagnosed me with autism.  Within the description of my diagnosis, he mentioned idiot savant qualities.

The actual autism diagnosis happened in a way that was extremely common in the nineties.  He knew that I met the full criteria for autism.  He told my mother I was simply autistic.  But in the nineties, saying someone was autistic was equivalent to saying “This person will never improve, all therapy is wasted, don’t spend any more money on them than it takes to permanently institutionalize them.”  He knew it would be terrible if the insurance company took this take on me -- which they were already trying to do without that encouragement.  So on paper, he alternated between saying I had a complex and diagnostically confusing developmental disability, and saying I specifically had PDDNOS or atypical autism.  Using PDDNOS/atypical autism as a substitute for a flat-out autism diagnosis was extremely common in the 1990s and had nothing to do with whether you actually met full criteria for autism.  

My diagnosis was changed to autistic disorder later on by the same doctor, after the danger had passed and an autism expert had suggested making the change but suggested I go back to the psychiatrist who knew me the best to confirm that this was an accurate thing to do, since the expert in question did not know my family or have years of observation and testing to go on, whereas my psychiatrist did.  This was after a bunch of misdiagnoses that would take way too long to explain but that were also quite common in the nineties, in fact some of them were among the most common psychiatric misdiagnoses of autistic people.

The savant thing

So... at the time of my autism diagnosis, autism was an abstraction, and a word I did not understand how it applied to my life.  Words like ‘underlying developmental disability’ and ‘pervasive developmental disorder’ and really anything with ‘developmental’ in it might as well have been gibberish.  Even when I heard these things over and over, most of the time I ignored them.  I’d occasionally read a book by Donna Williams or Temple Grandin, identify to one degree or another, but not grasp what autism was any better for having read these things.  And most of the time, while others in my life apparently thought about this diagnosis a good deal, I didn’t.  The savant stuff was way under my radar most of the time as well.

I was an adult before I understood why I was diagnosed with autism.  I was also an adult before I really saw that I’d been labeled as having savant skills or savant qualities, and before my mother told me the story of my initial diagnosis. And to be honest, I mostly ran away from the label, inside my head, and neither said much about it nor thought about it any more than I had to.

Like many autistic people, I was conscious that the popularity of Rain Man had caused people to view autism as inevitably involving savant skills.  Being a savant had become a stereotype.  And Rain Man was an unusually talented savant.  Most savants have neither his degree of savant skills nor his sheer number of savant skills.  He was based on a small number of real people, most notably Kim Peek, who had agenesis of the corpus calosum and a huge number of highly impressive savant skills.

Like many other autistic people, I was very critical of the concept of savant skills.  I thought it was just a way of passing off talents as somehow unexpected or pathological or both, when they happened in disabled people.  I thought it was just a shorthand for giftedness, a concept I have a great deal of trouble accepting as real or useful, at least not as it’s currently defined.  And in many cases it has been used in these ways and autistic people are correct to be suspicious and critical.

And honestly I was afraid of it.  For reasons I still can’t articulate, it really terrified me to face the idea that I might be a savant for real.  But as I discovered, I am.

What kinds of savant are there?

One of the things that had me confused about savant skills was that, like many  people, when I think of savant skills, I think of the most extreme skills.  Those are also the rarest kind of savant skills.  Prodigious savants, as such people are called, are uncommon.  They have never been the most common kind of savant at any stage in the development of the idea of savants in general.

So here are the modern, official classifications of savant.  Remember here that I don’t make up the words for each kind of savant skills and may not  like  them.

Splinter skills are the least spectacular kind of savant skill.  They represent talents that are highly impressive specifically when compared with the cognitive difficulties the person has in other areas.  They are very common among savants.

Talented savants are savants with talents that are likewise in contrast the person’s difficulties, but they would very obviously be things the person would be considered talented for regardless of disability or lack thereof. They are also pretty common among savants.

Prodigious savants are the rarest kinds of savants.  They are people who have skills that would be considered not only highly talented but well beyond the range most people even consider humanly possible for someone to have a skill in.  Like the way Stephen Wiltshire can fly over a city once and then do a detailed and almost entirely accurate sketch of he entire panoramic view from memory.

Knowing these categories, I can see that I have a lot of splinter skills and sometimes veer into the realm of talented savant.  This is a much better representation of my areas of talent than te concept of giftedness in general is, because the the term savant refers to a talent in a relatively narrow area surrounded by areas of great difficulty.  That contrast has been a fact of life for me forever.  Like back when my hyperlexia gained me a high IQ at a time when I literally didn’t know what the word test meant.

Hyperlexia is something that’s sometimes considered a savant skill and sometimes not.  In my case, I feel like it is, because it’s an extreme and isolated talent that came seemingly out of nowhere and that is accompanied by extreme cognitive difficulties in areas that most people would assume to be related to the areas of talent.

I also had musical savant skills.  Perfect pitch is another thing that’s considered a savant skill some of the time and not others.  But the fact that I was first chair, first violin in the junior high orchestra by the age of seven, I can’t read that as anything other than an obvious foray into the realm of talented savant.

Up until I was in my early twenties, I had a spatial (not visual -- closer to kinesthetic, or the way blind people map space) map in my head of every place I had ever been, indoors or outdoors.  I never got lost.  Ever.  I don’t know why I lost this but while I had it, I can’t see it as anything but a savant skill.  My mother, who has severe spatial awareness problems (she’s very visual -- she and I are opposite kinds of proof that visual and spatial are not the same skill), has used me as a navigator since I was a small child,

I also have something that I feel like must be extremely common and not usually recognized at all.  I would call it a partial savant skill.  It’s a skill that isn’t quite a skill because it has no outlet.  I am constantly composing detailed, complex, original cello music without even trying.  But with no way to play it in realtime, and no way to write it down (translating to musical notes is a laborious, slow process for me), the music remains in my head and never shared with the world.  So I don’t know that this counts as a “real”savant skill by objective measures, but it feels like a savant skill with a  crucial piece missing.  I wonder how many people have partial and/or unexpressed savant skills like this.

I think my art (specifically, painting in recent years) falls somewhere in the category of either splinter skill or talented savant skill.  Which may always be a subjective thing, and it’s difficult to judge the quality of your own work.  But this has less to do with some objective measure of quality, and more to do with the way in which the art takes place and the way the skill developed and functions.  Savant skills are more than just the presence of an unexpected skill, there’s specific ways they are learned and function in a person that mark them out as different from your average talent of the same level.

And people do hide their savant skills sometimes, even when they are obvious savant skills.  I am not open about all of my savant skills.  Additionally, not all savant skills are in areas where people normally look for savant skills.  The current savant experts focus almost entirely on certain areas for savant skills, to the exclusion of other skill areas.  

Additionally, many disabled people develop skills that are entirely unknown to nondisabled people and therefore unmeasured and not accounted for in descriptions of possible savant skills.  It is entirely possible, in fact probably common, for people to have savant skills in these unmeasured skill areas.  I am no exception to this.   I have savant skills I can’t even describe because nobody has ever acknowledged the existence of the skills in question never mind come up with language for them.

Anyway, I eventually realized it was important that I face the fact that I have savant skills.  It’s more than a little embarrassing.  It’s not something I wanted to admit to myself.  I’ve spent over a year agonizing about how to articulate what I’d found out about myself.  As well as whether to tell anyone about it at all.

I know a lot of people don’t believe savant skills are a thing.  I have read several books on the topic and concluded that they are a thing.  And that they apply to my life.  I’m not capable of explaining all the details.  And calling something a savant skill is and should be very different than just a way of saying that someone disabled has a talent or qualifies for some definitions of giftedness.  (In fact, I don’t believe in any common concept of giftedness that I’ve ever heard of.  I do, however, now believe in savant skills.  They’re entirely different ideas.)

Anyway, I can’t explain why this was so hard to believe, herd to face up to, and hard to admit.  But it was.  I still can’t escape the fact that I have savant skills, and I’m better off not trying to escape or deny it any longer.  I have to admit that the doctor who first categorized me as autistic was right about the savant thing as well.  As I said, i’m not bragging.  I’m simply publicly admitting that my combination of skills and difficulties -- both current and past, since some skills have vanished and others have appeared over time -- fits the savant pattern perfectly, both in areas that are usually widely recognized as common savant skills and in areas they would never even notice.

[bee-whistler]

Traits of Autism in girls

As observed by Tania Marshall. My older daughter and I fit this well, though it fits her a bit better because I really matched a lot of the original Autism profile based more on how it presents in boys.

A surprising number of people are pissed off by the very fact that anyone makes a distinction between the presentation of Autism in females versus males. But it’s frequently overlooked in girls simply by virtue of how girls are raised or treated in society, or simply due to the fact that they’re girls and are frequently (though not always) hardwired differently (as opposed to my case where I fit a large amount of the original profile).

This is a long list but the gist of it is that girls tend to appear more social due to mirroring others or being encouraged to be more social. Inability to do so is often dismissed as shyness. Diagnosticians I’ve met have used that alone to dismiss a diagnosis of Autism, and I have to assume this is a frequent practice.

1. Intense emotions: in particular separation anxiety, stress, anxiety or distress. This is coupled with an inability to be comforted by affection, distracted by a toy or change in situation or by discussion or conversation with an adult. Anxiety and “shyness” is very common.

2. Sensory Sensitivities: there are most often sensory sensitivities involving vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, balance and/or movement and intuition or a 6th sense. This is known as sensory processing disorder (SPD). First signs may include a sensitive head, not liking to have their hair brushed or washed, clothing sensitivities, food sensitivities.

3. Coping with transitions and/or change: an inability or difficulty coping with change or a resistance to change.

4. Language skills: atypical or unusual traits in terms of the development of language skills. May have more formal or pedantic use of language. May not be able to express in words what she wants to say. Articulate.

5. Speech: may not typically be delayed, however there may be a loudness or softness in the voice. May regress to babyish talk when stressed, anxious or avoiding something. She may have begun talking very early.

6. The social use of language: may be apparent in that the linguistic profile can often include semantic-pragmatic difficulties, so that the pedantic speech may be apparent and theïr are noticeable eccentricities with the “art of conversation”. May use bigger words than her peers. She may also be socially immature, in comparison to her peers.

7. Hyperlexia: may have taught herself to read before formal education. Aspiengirls often have an intense interest in reading and develop an advanced vocabulary.

8. Play: adults may notice the aspiengirl may not want to play with others or she may direct others play, rather than play in a reciprocal and co-operative manner. There is an element of her being “controlling” or “bossy”. She may tell adults that she finds her peers play confusing, boring or stupid. She may prefer to play on her own, with her animals/toys or with boys. If she is extraverted, she may have difficulty with personal space (hugging and/or touching too much, poking or prodding, bumping or touching them, continually calling her peers names, not understanding that a best friend can play with others). Often may need more solitude than their peers or may not be able to socialize for as long as their peers are able to. Engages mainly in parallel play and seeks the company of adults/educators throughout the day.

9. Interests:  an aspiengirl’s interests is usually different to other typical girls, in its intensity and quality, rather than the actual interest itself. Often, play can be observed as more of complex set-up’s, organizing, sorting, collect or grouping items rather than actually playing with them. She may be observed re-enacting a social scene form her own experiences at daycare. A commonly observed interest is collecting stationary/art items, teddy bears, and the like. They may line up colouring pencils in colours, have collections of erasers and or journals.

10. Conventionality: Aspiengirls are born “out of the box” and may be observed playing unconventionally. Some prefer Lego, the sandpit, trucks or cars or dinosaurs. Many think in different or unconventional ways, asking continual and exhausting amount of questions pertaining to how things work, why things are the way they are, or why people do or say certain things. Many are quite highly sensitive and will ask about death and or what happens after death.

11. Appearance and clothing: Young Aspiens may look more tomboyish in appearance or ultra princess-like, usually preferring clothing that is comfortable. She may want the tags cut out of her clothes and complain about the seams in her socks. She may prefer to wear the same outfit day in and day out.

12. Imagination: Aspiengirls often have advanced imaginations preferring to spend time involved in: fiction, books, fantasy worlds, fairies, unicorns, ponies, pegasus, talking to and/or having imaginary friends or imaginary animals. This may be observed at times to the extent that the child may believe they are an animal, a fairy, and so on. There may be some difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality.

13. Writing:  Aspiengirls are often interested in writing and write their own stories on sticky notes, journals, and have an interest in fiction at an early age.

14. Nature and animals:  Aspiengirls have an intense love for nature and animals, often preferring them over people. They have an empathic and intuitive relationship and understanding of animals rather than people.

15. Gifts and Talents:  Most, if not all Aspiengirls have gifts and talents ranging from singing (perfect pitch or perfect relative pitch), music, art, (drawing, painting and other mediums), languages, acting and performing, dancing, writing, a superior memory, intelligence, just to name a few.

16. Determination:  A strong will, determination, stubbornness and/or competitiveness, argumentative (with teachers, parents or other adults), a need to be right (even when she’s is clearly wrong). This may be labelled as Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

17. Facial expressions and emotions:  A discrepancy between facial expression and feelings. For example, a “fake” smile, intense facial expressions or lack of, or inappropriate facial expression to the situation. May not understand or be confused by facial expressions. May laugh when she is in trouble.

18. Attention Issues: Parents may have taken her to a hearing specialist due to not responding to her name, being “in her own world” and/or thinking she may be deaf.

19. Hyperempathy: May be very sensitive to social justice issues, abuse towards animals, nature or the elderly. May experience the emotions of others. May wonder why they feel different to others.

20. Intuitive: May tell you and/or know about events, people that cannot possible know about. She “knows” certain things without knowing how she knows these things.

21. Curiosity and Questions: May ask an endless array of questions that at times, cannot be easily answered. May ask why they feel different to their peers or why their peers are not like the, or have the same interests.

20. Interests: Interests are usually similar to neurotypical girls, but the intensity is unique or unusual. An obsession with knowledge on a topic of interest is common.

21. May have vertigo, motion sickness (for e.g., on a car trip)

22. Thumb-sucking can last until age 9, biting of nails, grinding of teeth

23. May have Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD), hypermobility, clumsiness, poor muscle tone, may not be able to catch a ball or ride a bike, or poor hand-writing5

24. May have social anxiety, muteness and/or separation anxiety, may be excessively clingy and/or grind teeth.

25. May have fear and/or phobias (insects and butterflies, dark, separation from mother)

26. May have sleep issues

27. Personality:  May be intensely shy and introverted OR very extroverted to the point of annoying her peers or family members.

28. The Social Hierarchy: Misunderstands and/is unaware of the social hierarchy. May behave as if she is the parent, parenting their parents, their siblings, peers or teachers. May not understand that she is a “child” or how to “be” a child. May be isolated, alone or teased by her peers. May have a boy for a friend rather than girls. May not understand that she is a child, pretending to be an animal.

29. May avoid demands due to anxiety (also known demand avoidance or Pathological Demand Avoidance)

30. There is a family history of Asperger Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP)

31. May display interests more mature than for her age, may act at times more mature and less mature than her age.

32. A concern for the rules, a sense of justice and difficulty with perspective taking, theory of mind, social thinking and context blindness.

33. Social and emotional delay for her age, yet seen beyond her years.

34. Parents may observe some “self-taught” abilities and/or the child may resist being taught by others

35. May have less or lack a sense of “stranger danger” or safety and/or may wander and/or have social naivety, be too trusting, take others literally. A lack of boundaries

36. Some AspienGirls experience gender confusion very early, expressing a desire to be the opposite gender, not feel strongly either male or female.

37. A tendency to have intense social justice issues and to “police” others, which are often not appreciated by their peers. At times, she may have a misguided sense of justice and an inability to “let things go” or may not understand the issue is not her business

38. May be the “teacher’s pet”, may to interact with their peers not as a “peer” but in more of adult manner

39. A tendency to be too emotionally honest and unable to hide their true feelings

40. May have gastrointestinal issues, gluten, wheat, casein sensitivities to intolerances/allergies

[nancygduarteus]

The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human.  It also begins to explains the popularity YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several development psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

The videos that surface on the app are generated by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which takes into account a user’s search history, viewing history, demographic region, gender, age, and other individual data. The algorithm is basically a funnel through which every YouTube video is poured—with only a few making it onto a person’s screen.

This recommendation engine poses a difficult task, simply because of the scale of the platform. “YouTube recommendations are responsible for helping more than a billion users discover personalized content from an ever-growing corpus of videos,” researchers at Google, which owns YouTube, wrote in a 2016 paper about the algorithm. That includes many hours of video uploaded to the site every second of every day. Making a recommendation system that’s worthwhile is  “extremely challenging,” they wrote, because the algorithm has to continuously sift through a mind-boggling trove of content and instantly identify the freshest and most relevant videos—all while knowing how to ignore the noise.

The architecture of YouTube’s recommendation system, in which “candidate videos” are retrieved and ranked before presenting only a few to the user. (Google / YouTube)

And here’s where the ouroboros factor comes in: Kids watch the same kinds of videos over and over. Videomakers take notice of what’s most popular, then mimic it, hoping that kids will click on their stuff. When they do, YouTube’s algorithm takes notice, and recommends those videos to kids. Kids keep clicking on them, and keep being offered more of the same. Which means video makers keep making those kinds of videos—hoping kids will click.

This is, in essence, how all algorithms work. It’s how filter bubbles are made. A little bit of computer code tracks what you find engaging—what sorts of videos do you watch most often, and for the longest periods of time?—then sends you more of that kind of stuff. Viewed a certain way, YouTube Kids is offering programming that’s very specifically tailored to what children want to see. Kids are actually selecting it themselves, right down to the second they lose interest and choose to tap on something else. The YouTube app, in other words, is a giant reflection of what kids want.  In this way, it opens a special kind of window into a child’s psyche.

But what does it reveal?

“Up until very recently, surprisingly few people were looking at this,” says Heather Kirkorian, an assistant professor of human development in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In the last year or so, we’re actually seeing some research into apps and touchscreens. It’s just starting to come out.”

Kids videos are among the most watched content in YouTube history. This video, for example, has been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, according to YouTube’s count:

You can find some high-quality animation on YouTube Kids, plus clips from television shows like Peppa Pig, and sing-along nursery rhymes. “Daddy Finger” is basically the YouTube Kids anthem, and ChuChu TV’s dynamic interpretations of popular kid songs are basically inescapable.

Many of the most popular videos have an amateur feel. Toy demonstrations like surprise-egg videos are huge. These videos are just what they sound like: adults narrate as they play with various toys, often by pulling them out of plastic eggs or peeling away layers of slime or Play-Doh to reveal a hidden figurine.

Kids go nuts for these things.

Here’s a video from the YouTube Kids vloggers Toys Unlimited that’s logged more than 25 million views, for example:

The vague weirdness of these videos aside, it’s actually easy to see why kids like them. “Who doesn’t want to get a surprise? That’s sort of how all of us operate,” says Sandra Calvert, the director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown University. In addition to surprises being fun, many of the videos are basically toy commercials. (This video of a person pressing sparkly Play-Doh onto chintzy Disney princess figurines has been viewed 550 million times.) And they let kids tap into a whole internet’s worth of plastic eggs and perceived power. They get to choose what they watch. And kids love being in charge, even in superficial ways.

“It’s sort of like rapid-fire channel surfing,” says Michael Rich, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health. “In many ways YouTube Kids is better suited to the attention span of a young child—just by virtue of its length—than something like a half-hour or hour broadcast program can be.”

Rich and others compare the app to predecessors like Sesame Street, which introduced short segments within a longer program, in part to keep the attention of the young children watching. For decades, researchers have looked at how kids respond to television. Now they’re examining the way children use mobile apps—how many hours they’re spending, which apps they’re using, and so on.

It makes sense that researchers have begun to take notice. In the mobile internet age, the same millennials who have ditched cable television en masse are now having babies, which makes apps like YouTube Kids the screentime option du jour. Instead of being treated to a 28-minute episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, a toddler or preschooler might be offered 28 minutes of phone time to play with the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood app. Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is a television program, too—a spin-off of Mr. Roger’s—aimed at viewers aged 2 years old to 4 years old.

But toddlers and preschoolers are actually pretty separate groups, as far researchers are concerned. A 2-year-old and a 4-year-old might both like watching Daniel Tiger, or the same YouTube Kids video, but their takeaway is apt to be much different, Kirkorian told me. Children under the age of 3 tend to have difficulty taking information relayed to them through a screen and applying it to real-life situations. Many studies have reached similar conclusions, with a few notable exceptions. Researchers recently discovered that when a screentime experience becomes interactive—Facetiming with Grandmère, let’s say—kids under 3 years old actually can make strong connections between what’s happening onscreen and offscreen.

Kirkorian’s lab designed a series of experiments to see how much of a role interactivity plays in helping a young child transfer information this way. She and her colleagues found striking learning differences among what young children learned—even kids under 2 years old—when they could interact with an app versus when they were just watching a screen. Other researchers, too, have found that incorporating some sort of interactivity helps children retain information better. Researchers at different institutions have different definitions of “interactivity,” but in one experiment it was an act as simple as pressing a spacebar.

“So there does seem to be something about the act of choosing, having some kind of agency,  that makes a difference for little kids,” Kirkorian says. “The speculative part is why that makes a difference.”

One idea is that kids, especially, like to watch the same things over and over and over again until they really understand it. I watched the Dumbo VHS so many times as a little kid that I would recite the movie on long car rides. Apparently, this is not unusual—at least not since the age of VCRs and, subsequently, on-demand programming and apps. “If they have the opportunity to choose what they’re watching, then they’re likely to interact in a way that meets their learning goals,” Kirkorian says. “We know the act of learning new information is rewarding, so they’re likely to pick the information or videos that are in that sweet spot.”

“Children like to watch the same thing over and over,” says Calvert, of Georgetown. “Some of that is a comprehension issue, so they’ll repeatedly look at it so they can understand the story. Kids often don’t understand people’s motives, and that’s a major driver for a story. They don’t often understand the link between actions and consequences.”

Young kids are also just predisposed to becoming obsessive about relatively narrow interests. (Elephants! Trains! The moon! Ice cream!) Around the 18-month mark, many toddlers develop “extremely intense interests,” says Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. Which is part of why kids using apps like YouTube Kids often select videos that portray familiar concepts—ones that feature a cartoon character or topic they’re already drawn to. This presents a research challenge, however. If kids are just tapping a thumbnail of a video because they recognize it, it’s hard to say how much they’re learning—or how different the app environment really is from other forms of play.

Even the surprise-egg craze isn’t really novel, says Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “They are relatively fast paced and they include something that young children really like: things being enclosed and unwrapped,” she told me. “I have not tested it, but it seems unlikely that children are learning from these videos since they are not clearly constructed.”

“Interactivity is not always a good thing,” she added.

Researchers differ on the degree to which YouTube Kids is a valuable educational tool. Obviously, it depends on the video and the involvement of a caregiver to help contextualize what’s on screen. But questions about how the algorithm works also play a role. It’s not clear, for instance, how heavily YouTube weighs previous watching behaviors in its recommendation engine. If a kid binge-watches a bunch of videos that are lower quality in terms of learning potential, are they then stuck in a filter bubble where they’ll only see similarly low-quality programming?

There isn’t a human handpicking the best videos for kids to watch. The only human input on YouTube’s side is to monitor the app for inappropriate content, a spokesperson for YouTube told me. Quality control has still been an issue, however. YouTube Kids last year featured a video that showed Mickey Mouse-esque characters shooting one another in the head with guns, Today reported.

“The available content is not curated but rather filtered into the app via the algorithm,” said Nina Knight, a YouTube spokesperson. “So unlike traditional TV, where the content is being selected for you at a specified time, the YouTube Kids app gives each child and family more of the type of content they love and anytime they want it, which is incredibly unique.”

At the same time, the creators of YouTube Kids videos spend countless hours trying to game the algorithm so that their videos are viewed as many times as possible—more views translate into more advertising dollars for them. Here’s a video by Toys AndMe that’s logged more than 125 million views since it was posted in September 2016:

“You have to do what the algorithm wants for you,” says Nathalie Clark, the co-creator of a similarly popular channel, Toys Unlimited, and a former ICU nurse who quit her job to make videos full-time. “You can’t really jump back and forth between themes.”

What she means is, once YouTube’s algorithm has determined that a certain channel is a source of videos about slime, or colors, or shapes, or whatever else—and especially once a channel has had a hit video on a given topic—videomakers stray from that classification at their peril. “Honestly, YouTube picks for you,” she says. “Trending right now is Paw Patrol, so we do a lot of Paw Patrol.”

There are other key strategies for making a YouTube Kids video go viral. Make enough of these things and you start to get a sense of what children want to see, she says. “I wish I could tell you more,” she added, “But I don’t want to introduce competition. And, honestly, nobody really understands it. ”

The other thing people don’t yet understand is how growing up in the mobile internet age will change the way children think about storytelling. “There’s a rich set of literature showing kids who are reading more books are more imaginative,” says Calvert, of the Children’s Digital Media Center. “But in the age of interactivity, it’s no just longer consuming what somebody else makes. It’s also making you’re own thing.”

In other words, the youngest generation of app users is developing new expectations about narrative structure and informational environments. Beyond the thrill a preschooler gets from tapping a screen, or watching The Bing Bong Song video for the umpteenth time, the long-term implications for cellphone-toting toddlers are tangled up with all the other complexities of living in a highly networked on-demand world.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/what-youtube-reveals-about-the-toddler-mind/534765/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human.  It also begins to explains the popularity YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several development psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

The videos that surface on the app are generated by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which takes into account a user’s search history, viewing history, demographic region, gender, age, and other individual data. The algorithm is basically a funnel through which every YouTube video is poured—with only a few making it onto a person’s screen.

This recommendation engine poses a difficult task, simply because of the scale of the platform. “YouTube recommendations are responsible for helping more than a billion users discover personalized content from an ever-growing corpus of videos,” researchers at Google, which owns YouTube, wrote in a 2016 paper about the algorithm. That includes many hours of video uploaded to the site every second of every day. Making a recommendation system that’s worthwhile is  “extremely challenging,” they wrote, because the algorithm has to continuously sift through a mind-boggling trove of content and instantly identify the freshest and most relevant videos—all while knowing how to ignore the noise.

The architecture of YouTube’s recommendation system, in which “candidate videos” are retrieved and ranked before presenting only a few to the user. (Google / YouTube)

And here’s where the ouroboros factor comes in: Kids watch the same kinds of videos over and over. Videomakers take notice of what’s most popular, then mimic it, hoping that kids will click on their stuff. When they do, YouTube’s algorithm takes notice, and recommends those videos to kids. Kids keep clicking on them, and keep being offered more of the same. Which means video makers keep making those kinds of videos—hoping kids will click.

This is, in essence, how all algorithms work. It’s how filter bubbles are made. A little bit of computer code tracks what you find engaging—what sorts of videos do you watch most often, and for the longest periods of time?—then sends you more of that kind of stuff. Viewed a certain way, YouTube Kids is offering programming that’s very specifically tailored to what children want to see. Kids are actually selecting it themselves, right down to the second they lose interest and choose to tap on something else. The YouTube app, in other words, is a giant reflection of what kids want.  In this way, it opens a special kind of window into a child’s psyche.

But what does it reveal?

“Up until very recently, surprisingly few people were looking at this,” says Heather Kirkorian, an assistant professor of human development in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In the last year or so, we’re actually seeing some research into apps and touchscreens. It’s just starting to come out.”

Kids videos are among the most watched content in YouTube history. This video, for example, has been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, according to YouTube’s count:

You can find some high-quality animation on YouTube Kids, plus clips from television shows like Peppa Pig, and sing-along nursery rhymes. “Daddy Finger” is basically the YouTube Kids anthem, and ChuChu TV’s dynamic interpretations of popular kid songs are basically inescapable.

Many of the most popular videos have an amateur feel. Toy demonstrations like surprise-egg videos are huge. These videos are just what they sound like: adults narrate as they play with various toys, often by pulling them out of plastic eggs or peeling away layers of slime or Play-Doh to reveal a hidden figurine.

Kids go nuts for these things.

Here’s a video from the YouTube Kids vloggers Toys Unlimited that’s logged more than 25 million views, for example:

The vague weirdness of these videos aside, it’s actually easy to see why kids like them. “Who doesn’t want to get a surprise? That’s sort of how all of us operate,” says Sandra Calvert, the director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown University. In addition to surprises being fun, many of the videos are basically toy commercials. (This video of a person pressing sparkly Play-Doh onto chintzy Disney princess figurines has been viewed 550 million times.) And they let kids tap into a whole internet’s worth of plastic eggs and perceived power. They get to choose what they watch. And kids love being in charge, even in superficial ways.

“It’s sort of like rapid-fire channel surfing,” says Michael Rich, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health. “In many ways YouTube Kids is better suited to the attention span of a young child—just by virtue of its length—than something like a half-hour or hour broadcast program can be.”

Rich and others compare the app to predecessors like Sesame Street, which introduced short segments within a longer program, in part to keep the attention of the young children watching. For decades, researchers have looked at how kids respond to television. Now they’re examining the way children use mobile apps—how many hours they’re spending, which apps they’re using, and so on.

It makes sense that researchers have begun to take notice. In the mobile internet age, the same millennials who have ditched cable television en masse are now having babies, which makes apps like YouTube Kids the screentime option du jour. Instead of being treated to a 28-minute episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, a toddler or preschooler might be offered 28 minutes of phone time to play with the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood app. Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is a television program, too—a spin-off of Mr. Roger’s—aimed at viewers aged 2 years old to 4 years old.

But toddlers and preschoolers are actually pretty separate groups, as far researchers are concerned. A 2-year-old and a 4-year-old might both like watching Daniel Tiger, or the same YouTube Kids video, but their takeaway is apt to be much different, Kirkorian told me. Children under the age of 3 tend to have difficulty taking information relayed to them through a screen and applying it to real-life situations. Many studies have reached similar conclusions, with a few notable exceptions. Researchers recently discovered that when a screentime experience becomes interactive—Facetiming with Grandmère, let’s say—kids under 3 years old actually can make strong connections between what’s happening onscreen and offscreen.

Kirkorian’s lab designed a series of experiments to see how much of a role interactivity plays in helping a young child transfer information this way. She and her colleagues found striking learning differences among what young children learned—even kids under 2 years old—when they could interact with an app versus when they were just watching a screen. Other researchers, too, have found that incorporating some sort of interactivity helps children retain information better. Researchers at different institutions have different definitions of “interactivity,” but in one experiment it was an act as simple as pressing a spacebar.

“So there does seem to be something about the act of choosing, having some kind of agency,  that makes a difference for little kids,” Kirkorian says. “The speculative part is why that makes a difference.”

One idea is that kids, especially, like to watch the same things over and over and over again until they really understand it. I watched the Dumbo VHS so many times as a little kid that I would recite the movie on long car rides. Apparently, this is not unusual—at least not since the age of VCRs and, subsequently, on-demand programming and apps. “If they have the opportunity to choose what they’re watching, then they’re likely to interact in a way that meets their learning goals,” Kirkorian says. “We know the act of learning new information is rewarding, so they’re likely to pick the information or videos that are in that sweet spot.”

“Children like to watch the same thing over and over,” says Calvert, of Georgetown. “Some of that is a comprehension issue, so they’ll repeatedly look at it so they can understand the story. Kids often don’t understand people’s motives, and that’s a major driver for a story. They don’t often understand the link between actions and consequences.”

Young kids are also just predisposed to becoming obsessive about relatively narrow interests. (Elephants! Trains! The moon! Ice cream!) Around the 18-month mark, many toddlers develop “extremely intense interests,” says Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. Which is part of why kids using apps like YouTube Kids often select videos that portray familiar concepts—ones that feature a cartoon character or topic they’re already drawn to. This presents a research challenge, however. If kids are just tapping a thumbnail of a video because they recognize it, it’s hard to say how much they’re learning—or how different the app environment really is from other forms of play.

Even the surprise-egg craze isn’t really novel, says Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “They are relatively fast paced and they include something that young children really like: things being enclosed and unwrapped,” she told me. “I have not tested it, but it seems unlikely that children are learning from these videos since they are not clearly constructed.”

“Interactivity is not always a good thing,” she added.

Researchers differ on the degree to which YouTube Kids is a valuable educational tool. Obviously, it depends on the video and the involvement of a caregiver to help contextualize what’s on screen. But questions about how the algorithm works also play a role. It’s not clear, for instance, how heavily YouTube weighs previous watching behaviors in its recommendation engine. If a kid binge-watches a bunch of videos that are lower quality in terms of learning potential, are they then stuck in a filter bubble where they’ll only see similarly low-quality programming?

There isn’t a human handpicking the best videos for kids to watch. The only human input on YouTube’s side is to monitor the app for inappropriate content, a spokesperson for YouTube told me. Quality control has still been an issue, however. YouTube Kids last year featured a video that showed Mickey Mouse-esque characters shooting one another in the head with guns, Today reported.

“The available content is not curated but rather filtered into the app via the algorithm,” said Nina Knight, a YouTube spokesperson. “So unlike traditional TV, where the content is being selected for you at a specified time, the YouTube Kids app gives each child and family more of the type of content they love and anytime they want it, which is incredibly unique.”

At the same time, the creators of YouTube Kids videos spend countless hours trying to game the algorithm so that their videos are viewed as many times as possible—more views translate into more advertising dollars for them. Here’s a video by Toys AndMe that’s logged more than 125 million views since it was posted in September 2016:

“You have to do what the algorithm wants for you,” says Nathalie Clark, the co-creator of a similarly popular channel, Toys Unlimited, and a former ICU nurse who quit her job to make videos full-time. “You can’t really jump back and forth between themes.”

What she means is, once YouTube’s algorithm has determined that a certain channel is a source of videos about slime, or colors, or shapes, or whatever else—and especially once a channel has had a hit video on a given topic—videomakers stray from that classification at their peril. “Honestly, YouTube picks for you,” she says. “Trending right now is Paw Patrol, so we do a lot of Paw Patrol.”

There are other key strategies for making a YouTube Kids video go viral. Make enough of these things and you start to get a sense of what children want to see, she says. “I wish I could tell you more,” she added, “But I don’t want to introduce competition. And, honestly, nobody really understands it. ”

The other thing people don’t yet understand is how growing up in the mobile internet age will change the way children think about storytelling. “There’s a rich set of literature showing kids who are reading more books are more imaginative,” says Calvert, of the Children’s Digital Media Center. “But in the age of interactivity, it’s no just longer consuming what somebody else makes. It’s also making you’re own thing.”

In other words, the youngest generation of app users is developing new expectations about narrative structure and informational environments. Beyond the thrill a preschooler gets from tapping a screen, or watching The Bing Bong Song video for the umpteenth time, the long-term implications for cellphone-toting toddlers are tangled up with all the other complexities of living in a highly networked on-demand world.

Article source here:The Atlantic