Elizabeth Cashdan
University of Utah, UT·Psychology
Over recent decades, children in many Western societies have spent less time exploring on their own and outdoors. They spend more time in structured activities that adults supervise.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
- Topics
childhood exploration
independent mobility
nature exposure
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure how much children explore their surroundings without adult supervision, and in which environments, using phone GPS tracking combined with a vegetation index that rates how green each location is.
- Capture children's moment-to-moment location, activity and mood with experience sampling, in which children answer text messages throughout the testing period.
- Test whether independent exploration and time in nature are associated with spatial ability, using a virtual navigation video game and a mental rotation task.
- Relate exploration to executive function and well-being, using the NIH Toolkit Cognitive Battery, child self-reports, and parent questionnaires on parenting style and concerns about risky play.
More about the research
Parents often make these choices for safety or schoolwork, but recent studies point to costs when children lose independence and time in nature. This project asks how children's freedom to explore, and the kinds of places they explore, relate to how they think and feel.
Why it matters
The findings could help parents and educators find a better balance between keeping children safe and structuring their time, and giving them room for independent exploration and time in natural settings. The work may also show which childhood experiences relate to spatial skills, self-control and well-being in societies that value children's independence.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yingying Yang
Montclair State University, NJ·Psychology
Determine whether spatial navigation tasks such as the Hidden Goal Task separate adults with Down syndrome showing early Alzheimer's-like decline from those aging normally, comparing egocentric, allocentric and switching tasks.
Ece Demir-Lira
University of Iowa, IA·Psychology
Test a serial mediation model in which gestational age at birth affects children's number skills through their verbal skills and then through the brain systems for numbers, measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
Amy Needham
Vanderbilt University, TN·Psychology
Test whether drumming lessons improve inhibitory control — the ability to hold back an impulse — in 7- to 12-year-old children with Down syndrome, comparing an immediate-lesson group with a wait-list control group across two lab visits.
The school
University of Utah: 58 labs on PI Pages, $789M a year on research, 366 research doctorates a year.
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