Week 5 Notes PDF

What is a category? - General ideas and understandings that can be used to group together objects and events that are similar - Allows us to learn from experience - We are born with the ability to form concepts (core knowledge theories) Three basic categories kids sort the world in...

What is a category? - General ideas and understandings that can be used to group together objects and events that are similar - Allows us to learn from experience - We are born with the ability to form concepts (core knowledge theories) Three basic categories kids sort the world into: - Inanimate objects, people, living things - Learn the difference between living versus nonliving things - Allows for inferences - 3 types: superordinate/specific, basic/medium, subordinate/general - Functions and relations between objects - Kids learn medium/basic category words first - Sometimes children make their own basic categories - Place all vehicles into one category- anything with wheels tends to be seen as a single category Categorization - Core knowledge theorists insist on innate knowledge - Based on perception in the early years- will group similar looking things together, grouping a towel and a rug - Have to be instructed on the subordinate and superordinate categories: you don't learn the word 'vehicle' or 'labrador' alone - Causes for categorization: Wug and Gilly differentiations, *why things are the way they are aids in learning* - When just given a description of the animals, they found it hard to differentiate between the two - But when given reasons for why they have the features that they do, differentiation easier - Knowledge of self: differentiating self from others around one year of age - Have naïve psychology by the age of 3: expectations and explanations about the actions and minds of the self and others, predicting beliefs of others - Will not be tested on contradictions - Understand the effect of desire on actions - Imitate intended actions by 18 months of age- if I drop beans while filling them into a cup, an infant of this age will laugh and put the beans back into the cup - Understand the intention of others and self at this time - Symbolic and pretend play + imaginary friend: correlated with emotional understanding - Imitation experiment: baby understands the rules of the game, how to operate the toy, taking turns - Imitation begins at about 9 months of age - Intended action imitation- babies as young as 12 months old are able to infer another person's intended action after seeing it be done, can complete actions - Understand human intention quite early - Imitation is the first method of communication between infants and adults - Taking turns, back and forth actions- is much like a conversation - Intended action imitation- babies as young as 12 months old will perform the action correctly even if the other person doesn't do it right after being shown - Understanding that humans have intentions and mechanical objects don't THEORY OF MIND (important) - People can have thoughts and beliefs different from your own and these guide actions/applies to self as well - Develops between 2 and 5 - Age of 8- can pass a second order false belief task - 2-year-olds can predict actions based on desire, even if those desires are different from their own - Why do people believe/act the way they do? - By 12 months, infants will point to form others about events they do not know - First tier: emotions/perception - Emotion leads to desires (understood first) - Perceptions of the world lead to belief - Both these lead to actions and reactions - Circle, square, triangle experiment - Circle tries to roll up the hill - Square seems to help the circle - Triangle pushes or impedes the circle's progress - Babies as young as 8 months old show a preference for the square - Understand good and bad intentions - False belief tasks: - A first order theory of mind task - This box contains something you wouldn't expect; now that you know what's really in the box, what would someone who doesn't know say? (unexpected contents/object task) - kids under 4 can't get beyond their own knowledge to consider another's perspective, unexpected object task - 3 year olds will usually fail this test but understand that people have knowledge and desires different from their own - sally-anne task: unexpected location test - similar results across cultures - come in between 3 and 5 - Problematic for kids with autism- autistic kids do understand as they get older - Info-processing theory: this error in the false belief tasks occur because kids can't keep track of the conflicting information - Core knowledge theorists say there is a specific part of the brain for these processes - 2^nd^ born kids better than 1^st^ born than theory of mind: younger kid has someone to interact with all the time, older kids bother the fuck out of littler ones, so they have to stay vigilant and consider perspectives to protect themselves - Chinese kids get executive functions faster than Canadians, collectivist culture - The Jason and Lisa example: 2^nd^ order of theory of mind example - does Lisa know that Jason knows that she has read the letter? - Pass at about 7-8 years of age Knowledge of living things - Fascination - Almost always in first words - Objects \< Animals \< People (most interested in) - Personification of animals and objects- intentions and goals - Age 2: the cup meant to fall; the table hit me - Deem plants as objects and not living creatures unless shown that plants can MOVE - Characteristics of living things understood - They move on their own accord - They grow - Their outside is different from their insides - They inherit things from their parents - They can get sick and recover - Innate biology module- adaptive to have an innate understanding of living things (core knowledge theorists) - Essentialism: living things have an essence that they inherit from their parents (cat will have a 'catness' to them even if raised by dogs) - Causality: present very early - magic shows not enjoyed by preschoolers because they have their own 'magical reasoning' - don't understand the marvel of it - almost from birth - if a loud noise is made near a baby, the baby would turn their head to look at the source of the noise- understand that something caused that sound - blicket detector: a panel with to objects, both object placed on the panel, a noise is played when one particular object is placed upon it but nothing occurs for the other - which one made the music? Kids struggle with this till about the age of four - 2-year-olds able to reach out of reach objects with reach - Competence affects performance - Space: cultural tools help us form special categories via language - When being carried, babies don't really understand where they're going; hence self-directed locomotion is essential for understanding space - Cultural tools do help form special categories - Before crawling, will not understand that things have been moved - Using placed objects/geometric cues: navigation learnt - Time - Early understanding of temporal ordering - Lose understanding after long periods of time of waiting - Wouldn't be able to tell the difference between shorter intervals of time - Can't tell you the difference between 30 and 45 seconds - Can between 30 seconds and 5 minutes - Big ratios of time difference are understood, smaller ratios aren't differentiated between - Centration of events tend to interfere - Preoperational stage: which car has to go faster? A straight road or a convoluted road? - Which happened before, your birthday or Christmas? Kids can't order events in that way if it was months ago - Numbers: - Two systems in animals and human infants: - Hardwired in brains for evolution - Subitizing system in fish/every animal, they can count up to three - Subitizing system: counting - Ratio system: understanding more and less - Need large ratios to differentiate that, can't tell differences between similar ratios until they learn how to count - 16 cookies as compared to 4 cookies - Experiment: placed a bear on a stage, pulled the curtain down, hand seen placing another object and leaving empty, would show likely outcome (two bears) or 'impossible' outcome (one bear) - Result: infants looked much longer at the impossible outcome, proof that they understand the difference between one and two - Counting - Understanding five principles which come in by 4-5 years - One to one correspondence: if I'm counting things, I have to count each thing, and each thing gets one number-word - Stable order: I have to count in order, ie 1,2,3,4.... - Cardinality: when you stop counting, that's the number of items you have - Order irrelevance: I can count in any way I can- I can start from the left or right, top or bottom, in any direction as long as a stable order is there - Abstraction: you can count anything, last principle to come in - Difference between USA and Chinese kids counting abilities: Chinese kids able to count more numbers than USA kids at the same age - Why: language differences- Cantonese and Mandarin, its like ten-one, ten-two for eleven and twelve, easier for them to understand - Habituation - Getting used to a repetitive stimulus until they no longer respond to it - Phase 2: show them something similar and see if they dishabituate - Issue with research: designed to test perception, and now used for conceptual understanding - Can't gauge baby's understanding- do they actually understand the difference n concepts or just differences in perception? - Preferential looking - Two different stimuli on different screens, speaker plays sounds in the background, camera shows where the baby is looking - Shows whether the child understands the words or not - Until 2 years of age - Violation of expectation experiments- habituation trial occurs beforehand to get the surprise reaction, look longer if something defies their expectations - Intermodal perception - Perceive sight and sound together from birth - Look longer at a pacifier they've sucked on already: early in development, for the first four months, infants look longer at things that they like/expect/are known to them - Experiment: put a screen around to the belly, couldn't see their legs, had a video showing their leg movements (unexpected) - Result: baby would look longer at screen not synchronised with its leg movements - Can perceive their own body movements in space - Will look longer at speech synchronized with facial movements