Comments:New study shows children's perception of rainforest wildlife

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That's nice to know

I understand the idea of, "Sometimes in science, the practical purpose will reveal itself later," but come on. Do we really need to know this? What a waste of time, energy, and money. - w:User:Ian Lee 21:08, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

PLoS ONE

I blame the bean counters. "How many publications do you have?"

Here is some information about the journal in which the paper was published...

PLoS ONE is built on several conceptual differences compared to traditional peer-reviewed publishing so far.

It does not use presumed importance of a paper as a criterion for rejection. Instead, PLoS ONE only verifies whether experiments were conducted rigorously and astutely and will publish any paper where this is the case. This policy is likely to produce a low impact factor of PLoS ONE compared to other PLoS journals once assigned.

Being an online-only publication allows PLoS ONE to publish more papers than a journal that prints a weekly or monthly issue. This again increased the ease of publishing while it makes screening papers on PLoS ONE more difficult due to sheer total number of publications.

Children's drawing as an scientific study?

I'm sure these children just don't understand the macro-level impact of such animals. I doubt a child that young could even understand the concept. These children obviously would draw the animals they find most attractive in their minds, not just animals they're aware of. How many of these kids drew micro-organisms, which of course have a much larger impact than ants do. The absurdities of this study are obvious and laughable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.226.230.36 (talk) 20:28, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

What a ridiculous study

A child paints a tiger because its cool, not because of its function in the biological ecosystem of forestation near the equatorial circle of latitude. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.89.0.118 (talk) 21:00, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

But isn't that the point? It's not trying to highlight what children do know, but what they don't, and questioning why. Talkingpie (talk) 19:13, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes exactly. I think that the point of this study was to show that, for whatever reason (likely 'cuteness' and 'coolness' as you say), children are more aware of low impact creatures than they are of high impact creatures. What this study neglects, imo, is that many adults have the same perceptional biases that children do. We want to save cute animals, but if a species of mosquito was near extinction, I suspect we'd all cheer and talk about how malaria would be eliminated, rather than the many negative side effects such an extinction would have. Cute beats useful any day of the week.Gopher65_talk 19:34, 6 July 2008 (UTC)