Cognitive Science 1 - Lec 15 Cognitive Development

Depth Perception

the ability to perceive the world in three dimensions and judge the distance of objects

Visual Cliff Experiment

Experiment tested depth perception in crawling infants (6-7 months)

The setup involved a table covered with a glass surface that created the illusion of a steep drop on one side, though both sides were safe to crawl on.

• Most crawling infants were scared to walk on glass

• Younger, non-crawling infants were not scared

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Theory of how humans acquire, construct, and use knowledge

• observed that children of different ages made different kinds of mistakes when solving problems and therefore are not just “little adults”

Consisted 4 stages:

• sensorimotor

• Pre-operational

• Concrete operational

• Formal operational

Sensorimotor stage

(0-2 years) stage of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development where children learn through actions (grasping, sucking, stepping)

They develop object permanence

Object permanence

Understanding objects exist even when unseen

• before this, infants don’t search for hidden toys or understand peek-a-boo

• One of the most important accomplishments of sensorimotor stage

Pre-operational stage

(2-7 years) Child develops ability to symbolize objects and events that are absent

• engage in pretend play

• Thinking is egocentric

• Lack understanding conservation

• Shift to new stage happens abruptly (in a couple weeks)

Three-mountain task

assesses egocentrism in children during the pre-operational stage of cognitive development (ages 2–7).

• Children are shown a model with three mountains of different sizes and features (e.g., snow, trees, a house). A doll is placed at a different position around the model, and the child is asked to choose a picture that shows the doll’s perspective.

Conservation

the understanding that certain properties of objects—like volume, mass, number, or length—remain the same even when their form or appearance changes.

Concrete operational

(7-11 years) Child develops higher order schemas called operations

• understand reversible consequences of actions

• Understands conservation

• Reasoning tied to concrete experiences

Operations

mental actions that follow logical rules and can be carried out in the mind rather than physically

• sorting objects into categories

• Conservation tasks

• Ordering objects by size or number

Formal operations stage

(Over 11 years) Child develops ability to engage in hypothetical and deductive reasoning and to think about abstract concepts

• understands principles like “adding 1 to an even number results in an odd number”

• Uses systematic testing

Systematic testing

methodical approach to problem-solving where one variable is altered at a time while others are held constant to view cause-and-effect relationships

• ex: pendulum problem in formal operational thinking

water bottle line task

tests a child’s understanding of spatial reasoning and perspective-taking (formal operations task)

• asked to draw or indicate where the water line would be on a tilted water bottle

Renee baillargeon

Argues piaget’s findings of object permanence rooted in lack of motor ability in infants as infants had to manually search for hidden object

• argues object permanence in children as young as 3.5 months

Dishabituation paradigm

Infants look longer at events that they find surprising

Violation-of-expectation

Demonstrated by Rene baillargeon’s drawbridge experiment

• If infants look longer at an impossible event, researchers infer that they are surprised, suggesting they had some expectation about how things should behave

• early cognitive understanding even before they can speak.

Folk physics

the intuitive, everyday understanding people (including young children) have about how the physical world works—such as how objects fall, roll, or collide.

Spatiotemporal continuity

the understanding that an object moves in a continuous path through both space and time—it doesn’t teleport or jump from one place to another without traveling through the space in between.

• relied on by infants

Featural continuity

the understanding that an object retains its consistent features (like color, shape, or size) over time, even when it’s out of sight.

• relied on by adults

Recurrent Neural Networks

By Yuko Munakata

a type of artificial neural network designed to process sequential data by maintaining a memory of previous inputs using loops within the network. This allows them to model time-dependent or context-dependent information, making them well-suited for tasks like language modeling, speech recognition, and time series prediction

• can use information from earlier in a sequence to inform current processing

• Uses backpropagation

Range test

Around 18-24 months, children recognize themselves in the mirror

researchers might:

• Present the mirror in different contexts or orientations (e.g., angled, upside-down).

• Place multiple marks on different parts of the body.

• Use delayed video recordings instead of live mirrors.

Mind reading

Ability to understand other people’s mental state

• allows us to make sense of other people and coordinate our behavior with theirs

• Key to human social interaction

• Rooted in childhood pretend play

Pretend play

Emerges around 14 months

when children use objects, actions, or ideas to represent other objects, actions, or ideas. For example, a child might pretend a banana is a phone or that they are a doctor treating a stuffed animal.

Infant’s primary representations of the world and other people become “decoupled” from their usual functions while preserving their ordinary meaning

Metarepresentation

the ability to form a representation of a representation — that is, to think about thoughts, beliefs, or symbols as being about something else.

• pretend play (understanding a stick can represent a sword)

• Theory of mind (realizing someone can hold a false belief)

• Perspective taking

False belief task (displacement)

a test used in developmental psychology to assess a child’s ability to understand that others can have beliefs about the world that are different from reality and from their own knowledge

• harder to acquire beliefs operation than pretends operation

Container test

Child is shown familiar kind of container (m&m bag) that contains unexpected object (marble) and asked to predict what other person will think is inside

Theory of mind mechanism (TOMM)

the cognitive ability to attribute mental states (like beliefs and desires) to oneself and others, understanding that these can differ from reality or others’ perspectives.

Kristine Onishi

Together with Renee Baillargeon demonstrated children may develop implicit understanding of false beliefs before age 4

• 15 month infants looked longer when an actor behaved in a way that violated expectations based on false beliefs (infants understood actor had a belief that was incorrect)

Implicit theory of mind

automatic, unconscious understanding that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions, which influence their actions, without explicit reflection or reasoning.

• develops before age 4

Explicit understanding

conscious, deliberate awareness and reasoning about others’ mental states, such as recognizing that people can have different beliefs, desires, and perspectives, and that these mental states guide behavior.

• speech and reasoning

• Comes after implicit theory of mind

shared attention mechanism (SAM)

Precursor to theory of mind mechanism where infants show interest in objects because someone else is looking at it or someone else sees they are looking at it

• requires infant to be able to embed representations

Embed representations

The ability to understand that others have their own perspectives or awareness

Joint Attention

the shared focus of two individuals on an object or event, typically achieved through eye contact, gestures, or vocalizations, and is essential for social learning and communication development in infants.

• sharing focus w/ another

• Enables collaborative and social behavior

• Children with autism struggle which correlated w/ social difficulties

Emotional attunement

When a child senses that their caregiver understands their feelings

“Still face” experiment

Caregiver acts normally, then suddenly becomes unresponsive to child

• supports that infants expect and need emotional feedback