Infant Cognition:

-          a constructivist view of cognitive development

= children play an active role in learning and construct an understanding of the world

-          children use schemas as building blocks of cognition to organize and understand information

= cognitive representation of the world

According to Jean Piaget:

-          qualitatively distinct stages of development

-          birth to 18 months: sensorimotor stage

-          “Schemas are limited to sensory experience and motor actions”

-          “Infants can actively engage with the world to promote their own learning”

-          “Infants cannot mentally represent the world”

-          E.g. infants do not have object permanence

-          Object permanence: knowledge that objects don’t cease to exist even when we can’t see them à out of sight

-          Shared with other species

-          Jean Piaget: “object representations are fragile in infancy”

A-not-B task

-          Two identical covers (A and B) next to each other

-          Show infant toy

-          Hide toy under cover A

-          Let infant retrieve

-          It do this multiple times

-          Then hide toy understand cover B

-          Piaget: Infants fail at this task before 12 months of age

-          Repeat location: more likely to fail until 12 months of age

è Piaget: “object representations are fragile until 1 year of age”

Challenging this claim: àinfants knowledge about non-visible objects is not as fragile as Piaget argued

Violation of expectancy procedure:

-          Assumption: if infants have developed some rudimentary knowledge about ibjects and they observe an event that conflicts with this knowledge and their expectations

àshow “surprise”

-          Measured by looking time changes

a)       Habituation: a solid screen rotating back and forth through 180 degree arc

b)       Placing a box in the screen path

Test events:

c)       Possible even: the screen rotates upwards, starts occluding the box, and then stops when it touches the box

d)       Impossible event: the screen rotates upward, starts occluding the box, and then appears to pass through where the box used to be.

Even infants as young as 3.5 months of age: look at trials of the impossible event

è Infants before 12 months of age expect objects to persist when they are out of

Question: In a classic violation-of-expectancy experiment, infants are expected to ______________.

A. look longer at impossible events

B. look longer at possible events

C. look equally long at possible and impossible events

·       A-not-B error: If Piaget’s claim is not supported, why do infants still make this error?

·       Dynamic systems theorists: performance on any cognitive task is “embodied” —> affected by the surrounding context & repeated sensory feedback

·       How would it apply to the A-not-B task?- A-not-B —> sensory feedback from repeated reaches intensifies a simple motor habit

·       What if the motor habit is disrupted?

Question: Which of the following would not improve the success rate of 9-month-olds who would otherwise fail the A-not-B task?

 A. Using transparent covers for locations A and B

B. Testing for location B with wrist weights

C. Testing for location B when standing

D. Having less repetitions for location A

Slight modifications to the motor habit change infant success rate:

-           Number of repetitions: How many times the researcher hides an object at location A before switching to B

-          Posture: location A sitting; tested for location B when standing

-          Wrist weights: tested for location B with

-          —> Evidence that infant cognition is embodied and object permanence may not be as fragile as Piaget once claimed

Empiricism vs nativism

Empiricist view: information processing theory of infant cognition

Nativism view: innate understanding of basic concepts (numbers, casuality, human mind, time, space)

-          specialized learning mechanisms that allow infants to acquire basic understanding of concepts unusually quickly and easily

Information processing theory of infant cognition:

-          general learning mechanisms (i.e., domain-general learning systems)

-          e.g. perception, attention, memory, reasoning

-          not born with domain-specific learning (e.g. innate numerosity)

Core-knowledge theories:

-           infants enter the world with general learning abilities

-          AND specialized learning mechanisms that allow them to quickly and effortlessly acquire information of evolutionary importance, i.e., domain-specific learning mechanisms

-          Role of infants’ experiences: important for helping infants move beyond the initial level of understanding, but not forming it.

Question: ________________ theories are based on the view that children begin life with a wide range of domain-specific learning mechanisms.

A.      Core-knowledge B. Information-processing C. Dynamic-systems

Language Acquisition 1: Speech perception

Phoneme: smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one word from another (bat vs cat)

Video clip from Dr. Janet Werker’s lab (Head turn procedure)

Phase 1: teach to turn head

-          Present child with a string of sounds

-          Embed salient changes (bell vs whistle)

-          When they detect a change àreward w. interesting toy

Phase 2: test

-          Present string of auditory stimuli (phonemes)

-          Measure corrects head turns

6–8-month-old English learning infants: discriminate between different non-English phonemes

10–12-month-old English learning infants: they can non longer perceive the differences between non-English phonemes

Questions:

1)       As infants get older, they lose the ability to discriminate between phonemes of any world language. This is an example of perceptual narrowing.

2)       WDYT: Which procedure was used to test infant speech (phonetic) discrimination?

A.      High-amplitude sucking B. Head-turn procedure C. Preferential looking procedure

3)       True/False: This figure shows Mandarin speech perception in Taiwanese babies versus American babies. This is an example of perceptual narrowing.

Does exposure to Mandarin with a live person make a difference? Mandarin Chinese speech discrimination test

Native Mandarin learners get better at differentiating between Mandarin sounds while American babies with no Mandarin exposure get worse over time. —> perceptual narrowing

-          Does the source of language matter for learning phonemes?

-          9-month-old infants randomly assigned to 3 experimental groups*

-          Infants in all groups visited the lab 12 times, for a total of 6 hours of Mandarin Chinese.

-          * We discussed more groups in class, but you are responsible for these 3 for any assessment.

“Does the source of language matter for learning phonemes?” Method: Head-turn procedure

-          Babies are trained to turn their heads when a sound changes

-          If they do so at the  right time, then the toy box lights up and “rewards” the baby

3 experimental groups: live interaction, TV, audio

-          Babies who were exposed to Mandarin through audio-only and audio-visual recordings performed as poorly as babies who were never exposed to Mandarin.

-          Babies who learned Mandarin through live interactions performed almost as well as native Mandarin learners.

-          Babies learn the sounds of a language from live interactions with other humans.

Infant-directed speech:

Distinctive way of speaking w/ infants (and toddlers)

-          Vary our intonation more

-          Talking more slowly

-          Use shorter words

-          Repeat the words more

-          Ask more questions

Do infants prefer infant directed speech over adult-directed speech?

First ManyBabies project

Methods: recording of North American English

1.       Infant-directed speech

2.       Adult-directed speech

-           69 labs from 16 countries

-          More than 2000 infants (range: 3-15 months-old)

Method: Infant-directed speech vs. adult-directed speech

1. Single-screen central fixation: time looking at the central image

2. Eye-tracking

3. Head-turn preference procedure

Results:

1.       Infants around the world prefer infant-directed speech

-          Infants learning North American English and infants not learning North American English both preferred infant-directed speech in English

2.       Infants’ interest in infant-directed speech increased with age

Speech production:

Cooing 6-8 weeks

-          Practice gaining motor control

àprep for speaking

-          Social intercations

àbecome aware that others can respond to their vocalizations

àuse to engage caregivers

Babbling: 6-10 months

-          (babadababababadababada)

-          Experiment articulation

-          Nonsense syllable combinations

Conversational Babbling:

-          More like a conversation with pauses, tum-taking, etc

-          Still nonsense syllable combinations

Question: WDYT: Do congenitally deaf babies (i.e., babies who are deaf since birth) “babble?”

A.      Yes B. No

Role of language exposure in babbling:

-          Congenitally deaf babies

-          babble with their hands!

-          only if regularly experience a sign language

—> babbling can be vocal or signed & is experience-dependent

Word Learning:

Understanding some words:

-          Begins around 8 to 10 m.o.

-           —> responding to basic commands (e.g. “No!”)

Early word  learning:

1. Holophrases = one-word sentence Example: “Juice!” or “Dog!”

2. Telegraphic speech = two-word utterances Examples: “Want juice!” & “See doggie!”

Word spurt

-          learn to understand 9 words a day!- understanding > production (“I can understand but can’t really speak”)

-          By 6 years of age: - produce around 6000 words! - understand around 14000 words!!

Speech segmentation:

-           “How do infants find words in pause-free speech?”

-          Example: “I want to have a kitty.” How do they know “kitty” is a group of sounds that go together but “akin” or “itty” is not?

-          How do infants learn the limits of phonetic units in a stream of sounds?

“Babies as Statisticians”

-          Infants are sensitive to the distributional properties of languages.

-          They are skilled at statistical learning.

-          Example: in English, “pre” is likely to be followed by “tty”

-          Example: in English, “tty” is not very likely to be followed by “ba”

8-month-old infants- 2 minutes of speech stream

-          Artificial language of English phonemes

-          No discernible English word

4 made-up words

-          Each consisting of 3 syllables: e.g. tokibu

-          “Words” presented in random order

-          No pause between the “words”

Only cue: transitional probabilities

-          Example: to” and “ki” always appear together [word: To-ki-bu]

-          Example: “bu” and “go” only about 1/3 of the time [come from different words]

Preferential head-turn paradigm

-           At the beginning a light in the center blinks

-          Then, light starts blinking on one of the sides

-          Infant faces the side light — > stream starts playing

Which side does the infant look longer? infant interested in that sound stream more

Preferential head-turn paradigm

-          One side: A “word” from the artificial language e.g. tokibu

-          Other side: A “non-word” combination e.g. bukito

Question: In the speech segmentation experiment by Dr. Saffran and colleagues that we watched in class, to which speaker did the infants turn their head (i.e., wanted to listen to longer)?

A. Newly learned nonsense words B. Novel nonsense words C. No preference

Results:

-          Infants habituated to the “word” stream faster

-          Infants listened to “non-words” longer

-           —> Infants use statistical regularities of the language for the segmentation of sound streams into words

Word Learning:

Main questions:

1. How do we know “puppy” is a word but “uppy” is not?! —> “distributional probabilities” — little statisticians

2. How do we know what is referred to by “puppy”?!

Which one is “puppy”?!

 Whole object assumption: whole object rather than its parts —> not just the paw

 Mutual exclusivity: only one label applies to each object

 —> can’t be both a puppy and a kitty

 —> “I know what a kitty is so puppy must be the other one.”

Cross-situational word-learning: repeated matching between what the child observes

and the word she hears

Gaze as a referential cue

-          Do infants use gaze for language learning? Baldwin, 1993

-          Do infants use adults’ “line-of-regard” (focus of visual attention) as a source of information about word labeling?

-          Participants: 19–20-month-old infants

Early Word Learning:

-          Infants use others’ gestures & gaze to map words to objects.

-          Social cuing: is important for language development

Syntactic Bootstrapping:

Syntax = rules that govern the ordering of parts of speech to form meaningful sentences.

-          The duck is gorping the bunny. —> gorp is a verb

“This is a chupi.” —> noun —> infants look at objects

“It chups.” —> verb —> infants look at actions

 —> Infants use syntax (arrangement of words in sentences and how they relate to each other) to extract and learn new words from the sentence structure.

Five steps “Serve and Return” (going to be in test)

-          Like tennis react children respond parents

-          Share the focus: interest or curious increase it

-          Support and encouragement: facial expression, and motion, (helping/playing)

-          Name it: toys or items as well sensation, builds understanding

-          Take turns back and forth: self-control and socialization

-          Practice ending and beginnings: like playing with one toys and shifting to other toy

Notice and serve:

Share focus:

Return to serve by supporting and encouraging:

Name it:

Social Cognition 1:

Social cognition in infancy and early childhood

-          Goals

-          Intentions

-          Desires

-          Beliefs

Gaze following

-          Another person’s gaze: information about what another person is thinking, feeling or intending to do.

-          Gaze following in infancy (9-, 10-, and 11-months old infants compared by Brooks & Mektzoff, 2005)

Question: In a study by Brooks and Meltzoff (2005), gaze following behaviors of younger infants (9 months-old) and older infants (10-12 months-old) were compared. This is an example of a ______________ design.

A. Cross-sectional B. Longitudinal C. Micro-genetic D. Cohort-sequentia

-          Infants sitting on parent’s lap- across a table from the experimenter

-          Two identical, colorful toys (targets) on either side of the infant

-          Experimenter made eye contact with the infant first à to start in a controlled manner

Open-eye condition : experimenter silently turns head with open eyes toward the target

Closed eye condition: experimenter closes her eyes before performing he same head movement

Dependent variable: where they looking?

-          where the experimenter turned: +1 pt

-          Opposite of where the experimenter turned: -1

-          Neither target (e.g. looked away): 0 pt

Results: Infant looking scores by age

-          9 month-olds: “body orienters”

-          10 & 11 month-olds: “gaze followers” — > understand adult looking in a new way

Gaze following in deaf infants of deaf parents

Question: True/False: In the study by Brooks and colleagues (2010), deaf infants immersed in natural sign language from birth were similar in their interpretation of adults' gaze behavior compared to hearing infants not exposed to sign language.  A. True B. False

*       Gaze following in deaf infants of deaf parents exposed to American Sign Language from birth versus hearing infants compared

*       Between 7 to 20 months of age, deaf infants understand and interpret adult gaze behavior better

Understanding goals:

Human hand experiment- Habituation: Reach for the bear

—> Even 6 month-olds look longer at goal change!

 After habituation: Switch the locations of the toys

Imitation: (Video clip: National Geographic - Human Learning)

-          a form of observational learning

-          children imitate even nonsensical behaviors of adults

-          important for cultural transmission

Learning to use new tools by imitation

-          14-month-old infants

-          Presented with 6 objects:

-          5 objects w/ probable actions

-          1 objects w/ an action the infant could not have seen before —> “light box”

-          14-month-olds —> imitate the “nonsensical behavior” as well

 —> Imitation is important for learning how to use new tools

Do infants just imitate what they see or do they understand intentions? (Gergely, Bekkering, & Kiraly, 2002)

-          14 month-olds

-          Experimental design  “I am feeling cold, so I am going to wrap myself in this blanket.”

What did the infants use to light up the box?

-          blue part: % used head

-          green part: % used hand

a. hands occupied condition: only 21% of children used head

b. hands free condition: 69% of children used head

= Imitate the odd behavior: when hands free

è infants don’t just imitate any behaviors

è Infants can evaluate the rationale of the goal-directed actions (i.e., why someone is doing something) & adjust their imitation accordingly

Question: In a study by Gergely and colleagues (2002), infants watched an experimenter who was wrapped up in a blanket light up a box using her forehead. Which of the following findings suggest that the infants imitate others’ goal-directed actions selectively?

A) More children used their heads in the hands-free condition

B) More children used their hands in the hands-free condition

C) More children used their heads in the hands-occupied condition

Theory of Mind

 = “how people come to understand their own and others’ minds”

Origin of the term: “Do chimpanzees have a theory of mind?” (Premack & Woodruff, 1978)

“Naïve theory” development:

-          emerging theories about the world around them- basis for everyday cognition e.g., naïve biology: “living things grow”

-          Theory of mind: naïve psychology

Understanding of desires: a child judges that another person may have different desires about the same object than their own

-          Example: “I want to play with the robot so my friend must want to play with the robot, too.” vs.

-          Example: “I want to play with the robot, but my friend doesn’t. Friend wants to play with the doll.” Video clip: Dr. Alison Gopnik - UC Berkeley

-          Participants: 14- and 18-month-old infants

-          Matched “Eeew broccoli! I tasted the broccoli! Eeew! “Mmm crackers! I tasted the crackers! Mmm!

-          Mismatched “Eeew crackers! I tasted the crackers! Eeew! “Mmm broccoli! I tasted the broccoli! Mmm!

Results: 14-month-olds: only 13% gives broccoli in the mismatch group- 18-month-olds: 69% gives broccoli —-> Understanding of desires emerge before 2 years of age

Question: When asked “Can you give me some?,” younger toddlers (e.g., 14 months olds) are more likely to _____________.

A) give crackers to the experimenter, regardless of whether the experimenter likes crackers or broccoli

B) give broccoli to the experimenter, if the experimenter likes broccoli

C) don’t give anything to the experimenter and eat the crackers

Social Cognition Childhood:

Theory of Mind: Understanding of beliefs: a child judges that another person may have different beliefs about the same object/situation than their own

False-belief tasks:

-          Example: false content task Phase 1: show child an object

-           ask them what they think it is

-          e.g. M&M bag: What do you think there is?

-          let them explore the object themselves to find out they were wrong e.g. pencils in M&M bag

Example: false content task Phase 2: ask them what someone who is not in the room would think/believe?

-          e.g. “What would your dad think is in the bag?”

-          e.g. “My dad will think there are pencils” (even though he didn’t see the contents and has no reason to believe there are pencils in an M&M bag)

-          —> “fails the task”

-          e.g. “My dad will think there are M&Ms” —> takes the perspective of another person/passes the task

-          Children tend to fail around 4 years of age, start passing around 5 years of age; typically developing 6 year-olds tend to pass

Example: False location task (a.k.a. Sally and Anne task) (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) 1. Sally has a basket, Anne has a box 2. Sally puts her marble in her basket 3. Sally leaves 4. Anne puts the marble in her box 5. Where will Sally look?

Question: In a false belief task, a child is shown two dolls: Sally and Ann. “Sally puts her marble in her basket. When Sally leaves, Ann moves the marble from the basket to the box.” When asked where Sally would look when she is back, the child says “the box.” This child _________ the false belief task.

A.      Passes B. Fails

Example: False location task (a.k.a. Sally and Anne task) (Wimmer & Perner, 1983)

-          If the child says “Sally will look into the box” —> “fail”

-          If the child says “Sally will look into basket” —> “pass”

Question: In the Mean Monkey task we watched in the previous video, a child _________ the task if the child shows the Mean Monkey puppet the stickers they really want.

A. Passes B. Fails

Theory of Mind training versus non-mental state training

*       “I am going to close my eyes. You hide the candy.”

*       Experimenter always knows where the child hid the candy: “Did you hide the candy here?”

*       If the child responds truthfully, the child loses the candy. If the child uses deception (i.e., lies), the child keeps the candy.

*       3 year-old children not good at deception

Theory of Mind training: practicing with classic theory of mind tasks —> children get better at deception quickly!

*       Performance on traditional false-belief tasks progressively develops until age 5

*       5 to 6 year-old children: likely to pass

*       across countries, but also cultural differences in the timing of understanding —> develops around age 5?

Role Play:

-           closely related to theory of mind skills

-          mental representations of other minds

-          Types of role play: Self as vehicle (pretend identity) or  Object as vehicle (e.g. teddy bear)

Imaginary companions:  common in typically developing children- relates to stronger:

-          verbal ability

-          creativity-

-          no evidence that it is a sign of developmental psychopathology

Imaginary friends: “Draggy is a little dragon. He is naughty sometimes. He protects me from monsters.” Imaginary enemies: “Alamara is a monster who eats children’s band aids.”

Question: True/False: Having an imaginary companion in early childhood is a sign of developmental psychopathology? A. Yes B. No

Interactions with robots:

-          “Robovie, You’ll Have to Go into the Closet Now”

-          3 age groups: 9 y.o., 12 y.o., 15 y.o.

-          initially interacted with Robovie- introduction (Kahn et al., 2012)

-          share personal interests and history- time to play “I Spy”

-          “Robovie, You’ll Have to Go into the Closet Now”

-           time to play “I Spy”- First, Robovie gives the clues- Child guesses

-           R: “This is fun. Can I give you a hug?”

-          “Robovie, You’ll Have to Go into the Closet Now”

-          50 min semistructured interview c. moral other stage (Kahn et al., 2012)

-          e.g. “Is it alright to or not all right to have put Robovie in the closet?”

-          e.g. “Was it alright or not alright to have stopped Robovie’s turn in the game?

-          e.g. “Can a person sell Robovie?” e.g. “Should Robovie be paid for his work?”

Mental states: —> majority of children believed that Robovie had mental states e.g. intelligent; has feelings

Social other: —> majority of children viewed Robovie as a social being e.g. could be a friend

Moral development

Cornerstones of moral development

-          Understanding fundamentals of prosocial development

-          Any behaviors that we engage in that benefits other (sharing/helping other)

Sense of fairness: dividing up valuable resource, reactions to unequal allocation of good

Sense of justice: reward the “good” and punish the “bad”

Moral emotions: empathy, compassion, guilt, shame, righteous anger

Video: can preverbal infants evaluate individuals on the basis of their behaviors toward others

-          Participants: 6-10 months old infants

-          Experiments: helper vs hindered (reaching behaviors/looking time)

-          Show infants “characters” wooden shapes with large eyes

-          Habituation phase:  red circle “climber”

-          Repeatedly attempts to climb the hill by itself

Two conditions:

Condition 1: helper

-          Pushes the climber from behind

-          Looks like helping it climb

Condition 2: hinderer

-          Pushes the climber down

-          Looks like preventing it from climbing

Infants: exposed to both conditions, alternating traits

Dependent variable: infants choosing the helper vs the hinderer

Results: infants (younger and older chose the helper and did not show a preference with or without eyes

è Not perceptual preference, but social evaluation drives infants preferences

è “Preverbal infants asses individuals on the basis of their behavior towards others”

Are young children helpers themselves?

Altruistic motivation: helping others when there is not immediate benefits to ourselves