Cognitive development Section 4.23

Methods Play studies Habituation Eye-tracking High-amplitude sucking Kids do the darnedest things! Habituation Get infant bored, then look for the infant to regain interest Eye-tracking Find out where children are looking High-amplitude sucking ERP Listed from easy to complicated

Habituation

Sample habituation data dishabituation habituation How long infants look no dishabituation

Eye-tracking What the infant sees Scene camera Eye close-up

Infant ERP

Theories of development Nativism Infants are born with rich knowledge of the structure of the world Core knowledge includes knowledge about events and objects Constructivism/ Empiricism Infants are born into a “blooming, buzzing confusion” Must discover the structure of the world by perceptual and motor experience

Piaget’s stages Sensorimotor: 0-2 (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence) Preoperational stage: 2-7 (acquisition of motor skills) Concrete operational: 7-11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events) Formal operational: 11+ (development of abstract reasoning)

Object permanence This is an example of the A not B task. The oldest method for studying cognitive development, used by Piaget and millions of others.

But what do young children know? habituation test Preference for the broken rod indicates perceptual completion

Object occlusion

Object occlusion Anticipations and reactions Reaction: 4 month old

Object occlusion Anticipations and reactions Reaction: 4 month old

Object occlusion: Data You can train 4mos to perceive occlusion earlier!

Early conceptual knowledge

Early conceptual knowledge solidity

Early knowledge of events Occlusion violation Containment violation Covering violation

More knowledge of events

Theory of Mind The “theory” that others have goals, beliefs, and desires Young children make mistakes in reasoning about others’ beliefs Piaget called this “egocentrism” (inability to take others’ perspective)

Sally-Ann Task Sally puts cookies in the basket. She leaves. Anne moves the cookies to the box. Sally comes back. Where will she first look for the cookies? (up until ~4 years, children say “box”)

Early theory of mind Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005 TB = true belief, FB = false belief. This is a tough study, but the idea is that the kids look reliably longer when the experimenter doesn’t look where they think she should. For example, in the TB yellow condition, the experimenter should look at the yellow box (because that’s where the toy is). So they are surprised when the kids look at the green box. The interesting thing is that in the FB yellow condition, kids still look longer when she goes for the green, even though *that’s where the toy is*.. Supposedly they’re surprised that she’s reaching for the toy because they think she doesn’t know it’s there.. That’s intense, right? Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005

Very early theory of mind? New goal and path Understanding Goals Woodward, 1998 9-month-olds are shown an actor grasping one of two toys Test: Toys' positions are switched. New goal: same path, different toy is grasped New path: same toy is grasped, different path Looking times are longer for new goal than for new path Thus, 9-month-olds encode actions as related to goals 5-month-olds show similar but weaker results No effects shown when claw grasps toy New goal New path

Piagetian conservation tasks

Discussion: how much is too much? Should we try to “pump up” kids’ cognitive development with products like Baby Einstein?