13. Cognitive Development

36. Concepts and Categories

Nature of Categories

  • Category: A set of objects that can be treated as equivalent in some way

    • Parts of a category definition

      1. provides the necessary features of membership

      2. Those Features must be jointly sufficient

  • Concept: the mental representation of a caagory

  • Categories are often messy and not as clear-cut as definitions suggest

Fuzzy Categories

Borderline Items:

  • Members and non members of a category are on a continuum, with no obvious break in membership judgements

  • People changed their minds about borderline items up to 22% of the time when asked again after two weeks,

Typicality:

  • Typicality: the difference in '‘goodness’ of catagory members, ranging from the most typical (the phrototype) to borderline members

  • Some category members are more "typical" than others. For example, robins are more typical birds than penguins.

  • Typical items are judged as category members more often, are categorized faster, and are easier to learn and understand in language.

  • Category Prototype: most common category member

  • Changes in typically lead to borderline members

  • Typicality Influences on cognition :

    • Typical items are assumed to be in a category more often, and faster

    • Typical members are learned before a-typical

    • References to typical members are learned more easily

    • people say typical items before atypical

  • Source of Typicality:

    • Frequency in which we see the object (not the most important)

    • **Family Resemblance Theory: Typical items share many features with other category members and few features with items from different categories.

Category Hierarchies

  • More concrete categories are nested into larger, abstract categories.

  • Basic Level of Categorization: the natural, prefered catagory for a given object, at an interident level of specificity

  • Basic is the most common due to labaling, and learning speed

    • more differentiated from other CATAGORIES

    • Super: members are not very simiular to one another

    • Sub: very view, making it hard to place an object in one

      • basic levels are not universal

Theories of Concept Repersentation

  1. Prototype Theory: people have a summery repersentation of a catgory ment to apply to the catagory as a whole

    • A set of weighted features (wings = high weight - birds)

    • explains typicality

  2. Exemplar Theory: Concept is remembered by past examples

    • denies a summary representation

    • Studies have low external validity

  • Researchers now believe there may be a combonation

Knowlage

  • Knwolage that make sense are rememberd those that do not make sense

  • Featurs that seem connected are remembed more then those that do jot

    • when we learn concepts we try to connet them to knolwage we already have about the world

  • Knowlage approach emphsises that concepts are ment to tell us about real things in the world, and so our knowlage of the world is used in learning and thinking about concepts

  • Psychological Essentialism: The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it.

Cognitive Development in Childhood

  • Cognitive Development: How our thinking changes through time

Nature and Nurture

  • Nature: Biological

  • Nurture: Environment

    • Both work together. Shown by the devolpment of depth perception it depends on genes, and exposure

    • temperament + looks

    • Children are active in shaping their devolpment

Does cognitive development progress through distinct stages

  • Quantitative Changes (continuous): gradual, incremental stages, i.e the growth of.a tree

  • Qualitative Changes (discontinuous): Large, fundamental stages: ie. caterpillar

Piagets Stages (discontinuous)

  • Individual → environment

  • Believed developmental occurred due to changes in shamata (mental frameworks or bodies of knowlage that organize, and synthsize information about a person, place, or thing)

    • outlined process of changes through schemata that constitutes through learning -

      • Assimilation: new information about the world is incorporated into existing schema

      • Accomodation: Altering ones existing schema as a result of new information or experinces

      • Equilibration: reorgnizing schemata

  • Sensorimotor (birth-2): Children learn about the world via their physical interactions

    • Object Permanence Task: infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.

    • A-Not-B error: Look under box A even thugh they saw researcher move the toy under box B

      • 10m -12m

  • Preoperational (2-6/7): Children repersent their experiences in lauange and mental imagery allowing for longer memory, and abaality to understand sophisticated concepts. However, there is a focus on one specific dimension (centration)

    • Symbolic Representation is available

    • Operations: Reversible mental processes

    • Water glasses task (conservation problems)

    • Cannot solve mountain problem (egocentrism and ToM)

    • ToM is passed at 4

  • Concrete Opp (7-11/12): Children can reason logically about concreate objects and events. However they cannot think in in purly abstract terms or systematic scientific experiments to falsify their belifes. (mastery of cause-and effec.

    • Pendulum Problem

    • Learn Conservation

  • Formal Opp (11/12-life): adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults

    • does not occur without exposure to education

  • Issues

    • Children’s experiences can effect their devolpmental stages: children who make pottery know that the shape does not effect the amount of clay

    • Varibality: At age 6 months, they retrieve the hidden object if the wait is no longer than 2 seconds; at 7 months, they retrieve it if the wait is no longer than 4 seconds; and so on. Even earlier, at 3 or 4 months, infants show surprise in the form of longer looking times if objects suddenly appear to vanish with no obvious cause

Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory

  • environment → Individual

  • Focus on language as a driver of development (not a by-product)

  • Focus on intersubjectivity

    • Joint Attention: ability to share attention towards somthing with others

    • Social Referencing: taking cues from others when dealing with an unfamiliar situation

  • Zone of Proximal Development: when children attempt skills that are just beyond what they can do independently, but have guidance from adults who know where they are in terms of progress

  • Scaffolding: teaching someone within their zod

Applications in Education

  • Phonemic awareness (awareness of the component sounds within words), is a crucial skill in learning how to read.

38: Autism: Insights from the Study of the Social Brain

  • Autism: The presence of profound difficulties in social interpertation and communication combined with the presence of repetitive or restricted intrests, cognitions, and behaviours

Defining the Social Brain

  • Social Brain: a set of interconnected neuronatiomical structures that process social informaitions, enabling the recognition of other individuals and the evulation of their mental states

    • Includes: amagydla, (emotional states of others + experience and regulate our own emotions) Orbital frontal cortex (reward feelings when around other people), fusiform gyrum (facial recognition), superior temporal sulcus (biological motion + interprate and predict actions

Current understanding of social perception in ASD

  • fMRI (where- spatial) / ERP (when- temporal): used to study activity in the brain (complumentry of eachother)

  • Austistic children have a reduced STS

  • Endophenotypes: A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation. Endophenotypes are less developmentally malleable than overt behavior.