Word: ertel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Colors, particularly, have "a decisive influence on the child's mental performance," says Henner Ertel, director of Munich's Gesellschaft für Rationelle Psychologie, where researchers have been studying the impact of environment on mental growth since 1970. Indeed Ertel and his co-workers found that the proper selection of colors could instantly raise the average IQs of a random sample of 473 children by twelve points. This was accomplished merely by testing the children in rooms that were painted light blue, yellow, yellow-green or orange-colors the children said they thought were "beautiful...
Primary Instinct. One other conclusion of the Munich group is that children prefer ceilings less than 7 ft. high. "It's almost a primary instinct," explains Ertel. "They want to explore their environment through touching. In the kindergarten experiment, the first thing the children did every morning was pile up the blocks so that they could climb up and reach the ceiling...
Looking for other ways to stimulate the learning process of babies, Ertel's team designed a Plexiglas crib. Here, too, according to the institute, the results were remarkable. The 38 infants who were raised in the transparent cribs were better able to see what was going on around them and to interact with it. Their mental development was remarkably faster than that of a control group. At 18 months, children in the experimental group were measurably more intelligent than two-year-olds who had been confined to traditional cribs...