An important applied psychology question concerns smoke alarms. Does the loud, screeching sound of a traditional smoke alarm work on kids? If not, what would work better? There's a Reuters press release about the findings of the study. 

Sleeping children, as it turns out, are fairly impervious to the screeching of a smoke alarm. Researchers found that most children ages 5 through 8 took more than five minutes to wake up with a standard alarm, as compared with around four seconds when they heard the sound of their mother’s voice, according to the results published in The Journal of Pediatrics.

“The thing that was most remarkable to us was to see a child sleep five minutes through a very loud high-pitched tone, but then sit bolt upright in bed when their mothers voice sounded through the alarm,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Gary Smith.

In this research, experimenters invited families into a sleep laboratory on four different nights. Here's how a journalist summarized the study: 

Smith and his colleagues recruited 176 children between the ages of 5 and 12 and brought them into the sleep lab for testing. The lab had rooms that were set up to look like a typical bedroom, Smith said.

The children’s brain activity was monitored with electrodes on their scalp and face, and they were allowed to fall into the deepest stage of sleep. Then one of four types of simulated smoke alarm was sounded and researchers measured how long it took for a child to wake up and follow a previously rehearsed escape plan.

The experiment was run four times with each child, each about a week apart, so that all the children were exposed to all four types of alarm: standard high-pitched tone, the mother’s voice with instructions like “wake up” and “get out of bed,” the mother’s voice saying the child’s name, and the mother’s voice saying the child’s name and then giving instructions.