full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Sabine Doebel: How your brain's executive function works -- and how to improve it

Unscramble the Blue Letters


(ltaeguhr)

So what I found was that kids who believed that their gorup waited for two marshmallows were themselves more likely to wait. So they were influenced by a peer group that they'd never even met.

(Laughter)

Pretty cool, isn't it? Well, so with this result I still didn't know if they were just copying their group or if it was something depeer than that. So I brought in some more kids, and after the marshmallow test, I showed them pictures of paris of kids, and I told them, "One of these kids likes to have things right away, like cookies and stickers. And the other kid likes to wait so that they can have more of these things." And then I asked them, "Which one of these two kids do you like more and who would you want to play with?" And what I found was that kids who believed that their group waited tended to prefer other kids who liked to wait for things. So learning what their group did made them value waiting more. And not only that, these kids likely used executive function to geanetre strategies to help themselves wait, like sitting on their hands or trniung away from the marshmallow or singing a song to datcrsit themselves.

Open Cloze


(________)

So what I found was that kids who believed that their _____ waited for two marshmallows were themselves more likely to wait. So they were influenced by a peer group that they'd never even met.

(Laughter)

Pretty cool, isn't it? Well, so with this result I still didn't know if they were just copying their group or if it was something ______ than that. So I brought in some more kids, and after the marshmallow test, I showed them pictures of _____ of kids, and I told them, "One of these kids likes to have things right away, like cookies and stickers. And the other kid likes to wait so that they can have more of these things." And then I asked them, "Which one of these two kids do you like more and who would you want to play with?" And what I found was that kids who believed that their group waited tended to prefer other kids who liked to wait for things. So learning what their group did made them value waiting more. And not only that, these kids likely used executive function to ________ strategies to help themselves wait, like sitting on their hands or _______ away from the marshmallow or singing a song to ________ themselves.

Solution


  1. distract
  2. generate
  3. laughter
  4. pairs
  5. deeper
  6. group
  7. turning

Original Text


(Laughter)

So what I found was that kids who believed that their group waited for two marshmallows were themselves more likely to wait. So they were influenced by a peer group that they'd never even met.

(Laughter)

Pretty cool, isn't it? Well, so with this result I still didn't know if they were just copying their group or if it was something deeper than that. So I brought in some more kids, and after the marshmallow test, I showed them pictures of pairs of kids, and I told them, "One of these kids likes to have things right away, like cookies and stickers. And the other kid likes to wait so that they can have more of these things." And then I asked them, "Which one of these two kids do you like more and who would you want to play with?" And what I found was that kids who believed that their group waited tended to prefer other kids who liked to wait for things. So learning what their group did made them value waiting more. And not only that, these kids likely used executive function to generate strategies to help themselves wait, like sitting on their hands or turning away from the marshmallow or singing a song to distract themselves.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
executive function 21
group waited 3


Important Words


  1. asked
  2. believed
  3. brought
  4. cookies
  5. cool
  6. copying
  7. deeper
  8. distract
  9. executive
  10. function
  11. generate
  12. group
  13. hands
  14. influenced
  15. kid
  16. kids
  17. laughter
  18. learning
  19. likes
  20. marshmallow
  21. marshmallows
  22. met
  23. pairs
  24. peer
  25. pictures
  26. play
  27. prefer
  28. pretty
  29. result
  30. showed
  31. singing
  32. sitting
  33. song
  34. stickers
  35. strategies
  36. tended
  37. test
  38. told
  39. turning
  40. wait
  41. waited
  42. waiting