Infant Perception, Language Development, and Cognitive Theories

Habituation paradigm vs. preferential looking vs. sucking paradigm

Habituation - look longer at objects that interest them (novel/unexpected)

Preferential looking - two objects/events that differ in only one way displayed at same time and look longer at one of them

Sucking - sucking more shows preference (especially mother's voice)

Overt vs. covert

Overt - physical attention

Covert - look at something but mind is on something else

What knowledge influences perception of objects?

Configural knowledge - configuration of objects

Physical knowledge - depict real objects

Experiential knowledge - how we encounter things

Are infants typically born with more adult-like auditory or visual skills? Why might this be the case?

Auditory

Why do infants prefer high-contrast stimuli, familiar human faces and voices, and human movement?

High contrast - low visual acuity so need low spatial frequencies

Familiar faces - high contrast in upper fields, like looking at features

Movement - we're drawn to motion, helps with identifying objects vs. people, can tell if female vs. male walk

Moderate discrepancy hypothesis

prefer moderate stimulation & intensity

What does the suddenness of changes in infants' binocular depth perception tell us about the source of the changes?

Development of stereopsis (ability to perceive depth solely with binocular) reveals the separation of neural pathways from each eye - essentially maturation

Happens at 4 mos.

Monocular vs. binocular cues

Mono - visual expansion (things bigger when closer), motion parallax (objects closer move faster than distant objects), occlusion (closer object occludes/overlaps on top of distant one), relative size, texture, interposition

Bi - retinal disparity, stereopsis, visual experience

Motion parallax (mono or bi)

When a person moves their head, the retinal images of closer objects move faster than those of distant objects

Mono

As infants age, why do they become less able to discriminate sounds from languages other than their own native language?

lose sensitivity to contrasts they don't experience

Why do adults use infant-directed speech?

newborns prefer it & it fosters speech perception

How is the development of music perception similar to the development of language?

they prefer things that sound nice, encode pitch in absolute terms; lose the ability to discriminate between unfamiliar musical sounds (strong at 6 mos. but gone at 12 mos.)

Interval time difference

difference in time it takes sound to reach ears

Describe the argument that intersensory integration, such as synesthesia, could be learned.

may be due to play experience

Why is self-generated locomotion associated with avoidance of the visual cliff?

Can't crawl - didn't care

Crawling - get scared & social reference

Walking - weary of heights

How do babies choose which words to include (and not include) in their early utterances? What do their choices tell us about their purpose in talking?

Why does early-occurring brain damage have less adverse effects on language development than later-occurring damage?

plasticity but decreases in age

Cues for word boundaries

Predominant stress patterns of words, transitional probabilities, phonotactic (sequence of sounds that are allowed within words -nt vs -mt)

What is the developmental sequence that leads to production of patterned speech? Is "manual babbling" part of the same phenomenon?

crying -> cooing -> simple articulation -> babbling (6 mos.) -> patterned speech (1 yr)

Construction grammar

learn specific constructions, recurrent linguistic pattern routinely associated with specific communicative functions

Why do babies at first express themselves in holophrases?

Holophrases - single word express meaning of entire phrase

Cognitive demands of speech production limit meanings that toddlers can express

Which are most common: Under extensions or overextensions? Describe the evidence on which your conclusion is reached.

Overextensions - a word to refer to standard reference and others

Underextending - a word for a subset of standard referents (more common)

What constraints are present on children's language learning, and how do they help or hinder language development?

Whole-object - assume object label refers to object as a whole rather than parts/properties

Taxonomic - when new word is used to label an object, it can refer to other objects in category (ex. blicket is shown for an apple, so banana is blicket but knife isn't even thought you cut apples with it)

Mutual-exclusivity - if an object has a known name, a new word refers to a different object

How does understanding of the social world contribute to language learning?

social interaction, learning objects in visual field

Evidence for critical periods in language learning

If you start younger -> reach higher level of proficiency

Best before age 7, 8-10 weaker, 11-15 weak, after 15 is poor

What basic memory abilities are present even in infancy, and what do they allow infants to do?

Association - basically conditioning

Recognition

Imitation and recall - recall a certain action then imitate

Insight - integrate related experiences that occur fairly close in time (mobile experiment)

Infantile amnesia and reasons it occurs

Neurological immaturity - prefrontal cortex, and new neurons in circuits may alter them and retrieval is less successful

Don't use language to encode

Parents don't tell stories until they're 3

Little narrative coherence (theme, incorporate time, place, sequence of events)

Memory strategies

1) Searching for objects - familiarity of task setting, placing markers above object

2) Rehearsing - repeating info

3) Organizing - used less in younger children -> rapid jump

4) Selective attention - greater attention = greater systematical strategy

Utilization deficiencies (Why do children continue to use strategies that do them little/no good?)

Children use strategies that don't initially help them remember better - typically with newly acquired strategies (higher cost -> don't use since not good at using it)

Use them to impress teachers/caregivers

Why are people interested in metacognition?

Assesses how much you know and when you need to go get guidance

Why is it good to have self-monitoring skills? Why might younger children be less good at self-monitoring than older ones?

Younger children are overoptimistic of their knowledge, can't detect lack of understanding, rely on heuristics

Important in choosing what and how much to study

How does knowledge shape what is remembered, as well as how much is remembered? How can information given after an event shape memory for the event?

Know more about the material you're trying to remember, focus attention better on distinctive features (encoding), spreading activation (activation spreads from topics directly and indirectly associated to it)

After - revised memories consistent with new info, misinformation can be passed

Why do children form scripts? How does it help children remember events in their lives?

Formed due to routine activities, parents' sorties, sequence of past events

Able to better recall what was most likely to have happened if it followed the script

What do children's retelling of stories reveal about their understanding of the stories?

3 years - omit main goal & internal reactions, add details that are irrelevant to main storyline

4 years - focus more on relevant action but omit main goal

5 years - includes all key parts of story

Interrelation between increasing content knowledge and improvements in basic processes, strategies, and metacognition.

Basic processes - Encode relative frequency of events for better efficiency of execution process

Strategies - apply strategies for familiar content, organization

Metacognition - better predict memory and learning content

Through what mechanisms does content knowledge influence memory?

Explicit - conscious & factual knowledge

Implicit - unconscious & procedural knowledge (heuristics and self-monitoring)

Why were IQ tests originally constructed?

Binet wanted to identify kids that required special education

Concerns regarding the administration of IQ tests to children from under-represented minority groups

Culture and language that children can understand, does family care about those skills, no feedback and can't probe, children have different expectations for the answers examiners are looking for, unfamiliar testing situations, examiner is different ethic/social class

Information-processing vs. psychometric approach

Psychometric - assess individual differences in intelligence but not nature of intelligence, quantitative measure across children of same age, can compare across all ages

Information processing - encoding, processing speed, how easily information is categorized, metacognition

How might the differences impact processes like speed of information processing and working memory capacity?

Speed - may hinder reading rate and reading comprehension

Working memory - memory accounts for significant variability in intelligence

Compare the subtypes of Sternberg's Triarchic Theory

1) Analytic - traditional, academically oriented

2) Creative - draw on past experiences to deal with novel situations

3) Practical - day-to-day problem solving

Spearman's g and s intelligence

g - general cognitive abilities & mental force/intellectual power

s - special intelligence (skills needed for particular task); mechanical, numerical, spatial, verbal

What criteria must be met for an ability to be considered intelligence according to Gardner?

1) potential isolation by brain damage

2) existence of savants and prodigies

3) identifiable core operations

4) distinctive

5) evolutionary history/plausibility

6) support from experiments

7) susceptibility to encoding in systems

Gardener's multiple intelligences

1 - linguistic

2 - logical

3 - spatial

4 - musical

5 - bodily-kinesthetic

6 - intrapersonal (self-understanding)

7 - interpersonal (others)

8 - naturalistic

9 - spiritual

Nature and nurture role on intelligence

Comes from genetics but not entirely-

Need enriched enviro to get highest IQ

There is a range of what's inheritable

Crystalized vs. fluid intelligence

Crystallized - (acquired knowledge) increases with age (may plateau later in life), prior learning, facts, experience-based

Fluid - (basic information processing) Peaks in 20s, capacity to reason, processing speed, learn new things, abstract & solve, think on the spot

Stereotype threat

confirm negative stereotype and believe it's true

may have protective functions if you have 2 identities

Concepts

basic elements of thinking groupings of more or less interchangeable elements

Defining-features vs. probabilistic vs. theory-based representations

Defining features - necessary and sufficient features that determine whether an example is an instance of a concept; influenced by schemas/experience

Probabilistic - concept that has a lot of properties, but not perfectly correlated with concept; cue validities (degree to which the presence of a feature makes it likely that an object is an example of a concept based on the frequency of the feature), basic-level categories (max cue validities), correlations among features, prototypes

Theory-based - causal relationships; innate

Prototypes

most representative instance of concept (has highest cue validity)

Superordinate vs. basic level vs. subordinate

Super - general (ex. animal)

Basic - middle ground (ex. dog)

Subordinate - specific (ex. foxhound)

What are the proposed core theories that children possess for counting

1) One-one - assign one number word to each object

2) Stable order - always assign numbers in same order

3) Cardinal - Last count indicates the number of objects in set

4) Order irrelevance - order of courting is irrelevant

4) Abstraction - any set of discrete objects or events can be counted

How does culture influence children's understanding of numbers?

China - higher ability to count because more systematic number system vs. US

Implication of understanding counting principles before or after being able to count

Count skillfully before they understand many of the principles via seeing others count/experience in counting (learn sequence of counting -> learn to count with objects -> understand the meaning of numbers)

Why is it a relatively late achievement that children learn to categorize plants as living things?

They think motion is what makes something a living thing

Category-based inference

labels help make them be able to make inferences