COGSCI 1 Lecture 15 - Cognitive Development

Piagettian Stages of Cognitive Development

• Theory of how humans acquire, construct, and use knowledge

• Piaget observed that children of different ages made different kinds of mistakes when solving problems → belief that children think and speak differently than adults

Sensorimotor Stage

(Birth - 2 years)

• Children act on objects (e.g., grasping, sucking, stepping), coordinate sensory experiences (e.g., vision and hearing) from these interactions, and form schemas (internal mental representations) about objects

• They learn to think about aspects of the environment outside of the reach of their senses

Object Permanence

Understanding that objects continue to exist even though they cannot see it

Pre-Operational Stage

(Ages 2 - 7)

• Child develops ability to symbolize objects and events that are absent

• Engages in pretend play

• However, the child still has trouble seeing things from different points of view: thinking is egocentric

• Understanding at this stage is based on appearances rather than principles

Concrete Operations Stage

(7-11 years)

• Child develops higher order schemas called operations — understands the reversible consequences of actions

Formal Operations Stage

(Over age 11)

• Child develops ability to engage in hypothetical and deductive reasoning and to think about abstract concepts

Strengths of Piaget’s Theory

• Provides good overview of children’s thinking at different points

• Fascinating Observations

Weaknesses of Piaget’s Theory

• depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it actually is

• Later research had found that children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized

• Understates contribution of the social world

• Does not explain underlying mechanisms

Folk Physics

Innate understanding of basic principles governing the behavior of physical objects

Infant Folk Physics

more weight on spatiotemporal continuity than on featural continuity

Adult Folk Physics

Featural consistency is more important

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)

• Designed to deal with time series and sequence data

• Can be used to model object permanence

Applications of RNNs

• Speech Recognition

• Speech Synthesis

• Machine Translation

• Music Composition

• Time Series Prediction

• Robot Control

Mind Reading

The ability to understand other people’s mental state

• Allows us to make sense of other people

• Allows us to coordinate our behavior with theirs

Pretend Play

Typically emerges around 14 months, is considered a major milestone in cognitive and social development

Metarepresenation

Use of a representation to represent another representation, rather than referring directly to the world

False Belief (Displacement) Task

• One of the best-known tests for mindreading ability

• Tests whether children are able to abstract away from their own knowledge to understand that someone else can have different (and mistaken) beliefs about the world

Container Test

• Child is shown a familiar kind of container that contains an unexpected object

• Asked to predict what other person will think is inside

Theory of Mind Mechanism (TOMM)

Ability to identify and reason about other people’s complex mental states, such as beliefs, desires, hopes and fears;

understanding other people