Simon Says, a game for children or an indicator for something more?

Have you ever wondered what makes Simon Says so hard for your child? Well,
the authors of the study in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology Peter
Marshall and Ashley Drew think that it might be worth your while to wonder,
having deduced that an inconsistency in rule making can have a large effect on
childrens ability to correctly follow instructions. Studies in the past have shown
how exceedingly difficult Simon Says is compared to other tasks of a similar
nature, displaying an 80% error rate between the ages of 4 and 5.5. Despite
previous studies attempting to simplify the Simon Says task by using puppets,
which significantly increased the successful responses of children, the authors of
the study wanted to directly determine the real reasons behind why Simon Says
is so hard for young children, and the potential implications for parents. The way
they did this was to conduct 5 randomly assigned tests with a total of 74 children
in a variation of the Simon Says Tasks. Each task was repeated 10 times. In the
first task, children would play a traditional game of Simon Says with one
instructor, who mimicked the actions while presenting them to the child. The
same traditional game was played in task two, however the instructor did not
mimic the actions of the instructions in this trial. Task three and four varied
slightly with two instructors being present, with the children being told to
specifically listen to one instructor and not the other, with observable actions
being present in task three and not present in task four. Finally in task 5, a
simplified Simon Says trial was presented, with the use of puppets (a Bear
puppet and a Dragon Puppet) to replace the instructors, known as the BearDragon Task. One puppet had been naughty and children were told not to follow
their instructions, while only listening to the other puppet. The results were
significant indeed, showing that improvements in scores were seen when more
instructors were present, while the highest mean scores were seen in the puppet
test. However, what do these results actually mean, and what broader
implications does this have on parents? The authors highlighted the importance
of these results, identifying that in the tests where two instructors were present,
allowed for a consistency for children to follow the correct rules due to constantly
having the same instructor maintain the correct or incorrect status. Thus the
difficulty of Simons Says may stem from the difficulty younger children have in
identifying the changing nature of rules when being reinforced from the same
person. Interestingly for parents, it must be considered that when setting rules
and limits for their children at home, to remain forceful and consistent with right
and wrong behaviours otherwise potential social development could be affected.
So the next time youre playing Simon Says with your children, you will have an
insight into why the game is so difficult and the implications it has on rules and
boundaries.
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Dean Esposito z5021301
PSYCH2061

Experimental Marshall, P.J. & Drew, A.R. (2014). What makes Simon Says so
difficult for young children? Journal of Child Psychology, 126, 112-119.