Lecture 4: Cognitive development

Question 1

object knowledge

Answer 1

Understanding that objects

Have substance

Maintain their identity when they change location - changing location doesn’t change the object itself

Continue to exist (ordinarily) when out of sight – otherwise, “out of sight is out of mind”

Question 2

A not B task

Answer 2

In Piaget’s classic A-not-B task, the infant watches an object being hidden in one location (A) and successfully finds it

This process is repeated several times for location A

The infant then watches the object being hidden in a new location (B)

Crucial test: where does the infant search for the object:

Infants who show the A-not-B error still search in location A rather than location B

Question 3

Factors affecting whether children make the A-not-B error

Answer 3

Highly replicable (meta-analysis from Wellman et al., 1986) – the basic result is not in doubt

A great deal of research has examined factors that make the A-not-B error more or less likely to occur, e.g.,

age of child - usually pass after 12 months

length of delay - longer delay, more likely to make the error

number of hiding locations - more likely to make AnotB error if there are fewer hiding locations

number of times object hidden in location-A

Question 4

New tests for object permanence

Answer 4

Infants appear more competent when tested via visual attention measures (e.g., looking times) than when given tests that require them to take action (Baillargeon et al., 1989)

In contrast to Piaget’s description of the development of object permanence, a great deal of evidence now indicates that young infants are in fact able to mentally represent and think about the existence of invisible objects and events

The majority of the evidence is based on research using the violation-of-expectancy procedure, in which infants are shown an event that should evoke surprise or interest if it violates something that the infant knows or assumes to be true

Question 5

violation of expectancy

Answer 5

Baillargeon (1987) and her colleagues have used this technique to establish that infants as young as 3½ months of age look longer at an “impossible” event than at a possible event

The infants mentally represented the box (understood object permanence) even when it was occluded and were surprised when the screen seemed to pass through the bo

Question 6

Why do children show object permanence with a VoE procedure, but not A-not-B task?

Answer 6

Possible explanations include…

memory limitations - e.g., the length of delay in the A-not-B task

problems with inhibitory control associated with immaturity of the prefrontal cortex-

competition between a representational system and a response system

Question 7

Physical knowledge

Answer 7

Knowledge of gravity begins in the first year

Infants have been shown to look longer at objects that violate expected motion trajectories: 7-month-olds are surprised to see a ball roll up a slope unaided (Kim & Spelke, 1992)

Infants also gradually come to understand under what conditions one object can support another

This gradually refined understanding of support relations is presumed to result from experience: between 3 - 12½ months, infants make progressively more complex judgements about what physical supports are possible (Baillargeon, 1998)

Question 8

Developing of support relations

Answer 8

Diagram is The Violation that is detected at each age.
Where each age will be surprised at the items
<-6.5 months
<-12.5 months
The order in which children begin to understand how one object supports another

Question 9

Understanding intention

Answer 9

Infants who see a human arm repeatedly reach for an object in the same location assume that the action is directed toward the object, not the place (Woodward, 1998

6-month olds looked longer when the hand went to the new object in the old place, than when it reached for the old object it had reached to before

Infants may attribute intentions and goals to inanimate entities as long as they “behave” like humans

In one study, 12- and 15-month -olds were introduced to a faceless, eyeless, blob that “vocalised” and moved in response to what the infant or experimenter did, thus simulating a normal human interaction (Johnson, 2003)

When the blob turned in one direction, the infants looked in that direction (following the blob’s “gaze”). Infants did not behave this way with a blob whose behaviour was not contingently related to their own

Question 10

Attributing dispositional states

Answer 10

Most babies preferred the positive aspect. Prosocial

Twelve-month-olds also seem able, like adults, to attribute

dispositional states (Kuhlmeier et al., 2003)

Infants watched a film that adults interpret as a ball “trying and failing” to get up a hill as it is being “helped” by a triangle and being “blocked” by a square

Subsequently, with just the three shapes on the screen, infants looking behaviour indicated that they expected the ball to approach the helpful triangle while avoiding the hindering square

Question 11

Conceptual knowledge

Answer 11

General ideas or understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar in some way

Crucial for helping people make sense of the world

Nativists argue that innate understanding of concepts plays a central role in development - argue nature is responsible for dev

Empiricists argue that concepts arise from basic learning mechanisms-

Question 12

Category hierarchies

Answer 12

A major way in which infants figure out how things in the word are related to one another is by dividing objects into categorical hierarchies (i.e., categories related by set-subset relations)

Question 13

Learning category hierarchies

Answer 13

Categorical hierarchies often include three main levels (Rosch et al., 1976)

A very general one, the superordinate level (living things)

A medium one in between, the basic level (birds)

A very specific one, the subordinate level (parrots)

Children usually learn the basic level category first, as:
Objects at this level share many common characteristics (unlike superordinate level categories)
Category members are relatively easy to discriminate (unlike those in subordinate level categories)

Children sometimes form child-basic categories whose generality is somewhere between basic and subordinate level categories (Mervis, 1987)
“things that roll” instead of “balls”

Children use what they know about basic level categories to form superordinate and subordinate categories with the assistance of adults

Question 14

Forming categories in the first year

Answer 14

Infants form categories of objects in the first months of life
Even 3- and 4-month-olds can tell cats from dogs (Quinn & Eimas, 1996)

A key element in infants’ thinking is perceptual categorization, the grouping together of objects that have similar appearances (colour, size, movement, etc.)

Often their categorizations are based on parts of objects rather then on the object as a whole (e.g., legs for animals, wheels for vehicles: Rakison, 2005)

Question 15

developing conceptual categories

Answer 15

Babies (7 months) treated plastic toy birds and aeroplanes, which are perceptually similar, as if they were members of the same category

Babies (9 -11 months) treated toy aeroplanes and birds as members of conceptually different categories, despite the fact that they looked very much alike (Mandler & McDonough, 1993)

Question 16

Forming categories in the second year

Answer 16

As children approach their second birthday, they increasingly categorise objects on the basis of overall shape

At the same time, they also form categories on the basis of function, and can use their knowledge of categories to determine which actions go with which type of objects – For example, 14-month-olds will mime feeding a drink to a toy rabbit but not a toy motorcycle (Mandler & McDonough, 1998)

Question 17

categorisation difficulties

Answer 17

Category formation takes time

4 year old was lead up to the answer but still didn’t understand

Need to understand the causal relationship

Question 18

Complex categories and causal relationships

Answer 18

Understanding causal connections – why objects are the way they are – helps children learn and remember new categories

Hearing that “wugs” have claws to help them fight and that “gillies” have wings to help them flee allowed 4- and 5-year olds to categorise novel pictures like these better than children who had not heard the explanation (Krascum & Andrews, 1998)

Question 19

Knowledge of living things

Answer 19

Although children are fascinated with living things and have a great deal of knowledge about them by age 4 or 5, they also demonstrate a variety of immature beliefs and reasoning

Children between 4 and 10 often believe that plants and animals were created to serve specific purposes, much like tools are (Kelemen, 2004)

Many children of these ages also confuse certain properties of living and nonliving things.

Question 20

Distinguishing people from non-living things

Answer 20

Task used by Poulin-Dubois (1999) to study infants’ reactions when they see people and inanimate objects (in this case a robot) engaging in the same action.

Both 9- and 12-month-olds show surprise when they see inanimate objects move on their own, suggesting that they understand that self-produced motion is a distinctive characteristic of people and other animals.

Question 21

Understanding what makes something living

Answer 21

Even though infants under a year old can distinguish people from non-living things, the living / non-living distinction is far from settled.

Children up to the age of about 5 have difficulty understanding that humans are animals (Coley, 1993)

Only between ages 7 and 9 do most children understand that plants are living things (Richards & Siegler, 1984)

Question 22

Knowledge of heredity

Answer 22

Pre-schoolers know that physical characteristics tend to be passed on from parent to offspring, and that certain aspects of development are controlled by heredity rather than environment

For example, if 3- and 4-year olds are told that Mr. and Mrs. Bull have hearts of an unusual colour, then they predict that Baby Bull will have a heart of the same colour (Springer & Keil, 1989)

Question 23

Psychological essentialism

Answer 23

Essentialism, the view that living things have an essence inside them that makes them what they are

Children often over-extend their knowledge of heredity and attribute gender differences to inherited essentialism
e.g., The belief that boys’ inner “boy-ness” leads them to prefer playing with cars, while girls’ inner “girl-ness” leads them to prefer playing with dolls
Only by the age of 9 or 10 do children recognise the influence of the environment on gender differences (Taylor, 1993)

Question 24

knowledge of growth and illness

Answer 24

3- and 4-year-olds realise that growth is a product of internal processes (Rosengran et al., 1991)

They know that plants and animals, unlike inanimate objects, have internal processes that allow them to heal – A scratched cat can heal itself but a scratched chair cannot (Backscheider et al., 1993)

They also understand illness and old age can cause the permanent state of death, from which there is no recovery (Nguyen & Gelman, 2002)