Development PDF

Development  Complete today’s quiz Sign in to AttendanceRadar Announcements Proposal for Short Paper #1 due Thursday See Courseworks for suggested topics See the Rubric in the Short Paper #1 assignment Meet with your TA (or any TA) if you have questions about the re...

Development  Complete today’s quiz Sign in to AttendanceRadar Announcements Proposal for Short Paper #1 due Thursday See Courseworks for suggested topics See the Rubric in the Short Paper #1 assignment Meet with your TA (or any TA) if you have questions about the requirements for the paper or need to request an extension  Where does cognition come from? Nativism Empiricism Key elements of Minds are simply cognition are innate general-purpose We start with a basic pattern detectors outline of which All knowledge of the representations and world comes from our algorithms to use, life experiences which is refined through learning  Where does cognition come from? Development (today): which cognitive functions are present even in infancy, and which develop later? Nature and Nurture (10/2): are individual cognitive similarities/differences based on genetics? Evolution (10/7): can cognitive functions be explained as evolutionary adaptations? Language learning (10/14): are there innate mechanisms required for language learning? What cognitive abilities are present from birth? How does cognition change as we grow up? Are there cognitive processes present in infancy? Ø Stronger than just heredity – looking for abilities that require no/little interaction with environment “Core Cognition” hypothesis: humans are born with multiple specialized cognitive systems Ø Enable infants to identify and represent entities in a particular domain Ø Enable infants to reason about these entities Core Cognition: Numbers Hypothesis: Infants have an innate concept of discrete numbers, allowing them to reason about simple arithmetic How to test what babies are thinking about anything? Core Cognition: Numbers Looking time: 11.89 seconds Looking time: 13.01 seconds Wynn 1992 Core Cognition: Numbers Looking time: 9.59 seconds Looking time: 12.67 seconds Wynn 1992  Core Cognition: Numbers Infants can represent small discrete numerical quantities, but this system fails at around 4 items Feigenson and Carey, 2005 Core Cognition: Objects Infants understand basic object properties like object permanence Renée Baillargeon Core Cognition: Objects Spelke et al. 1995 Core Cognition: Objects Infants Infants expect expect Spelke et al. 1995 Core Cognition: Objects Object permanence may be an evolved capacity, and does not require occlusion experience Prasad et al., 2018 Core Cognition: Agents Children (4 yo) Chimpanzees Horner and Whiten, 2004 Core Cognition: Agents Infant actions Hand Hand Head Head Infants overimitate most when action seems irrational Gergely et al., 2002 Core Cognition: Agents Looking Time in seconds (9 month olds) 30 ** 20 10 0 Grasp Back of Hand New Toy New Path Looking Time in seconds (5 month olds) 40 30 20 10 0 Grasp Back of Hand New Toy New Path Woodward, 1999 Core Cognition: Summary Very young infants show surprisingly good performance on some tasks, with no/little learning: Ø Tracking small sets of discrete numerical quantities Ø Understanding spatial/temporal object properties Ø Basic social understanding of other agents What are children bad at? … basically everything What kinds of cognitive tasks are children bad at? What kinds of reasoning seems to require years of development and experience?  Jean Piaget, 1968 Young children exhibit centration – they reason based on only a single salient aspect of a situation Theory of Mind Despite some early expertise in understanding agents, infants do not understand that different people have separate minds Often tested via a “false-belief” task Children younger than 4 report that Sally will look in the box Theory of Mind? But recent work has questioned whether 4-6 year olds actually have true theory of mind What about a “no-belief” version in which Sally was never in the room? Rather than say that Sally doesn’t know where to look, a majority of 4- 6 year olds say that Sally will look in the basket Theory of Mind? Theory of Mind? Children may be using “Perceptual Access Reasoning” Ø Rule 1: Perceptual access leads to knowing, and lack of perceptual access leads to not knowing. Ø Rule 2: Knowing leads to acting correctly, and not knowing leads to acting incorrectly. This kind of reasoning can pass most false-belief tasks, but fails in more complex situations. Complex ToM (e.g. maintaining a credible lie) may not develop until age 10 or later Fabricius et al., 2021 Language The specific language a child speaks is obviously learned from the environment Are children naturally “primed” to learn language? What stages do children go through when learning the specific rules of a (first) language? Language: Overregularization This child knew the word “ate” and used it correctly at age 2.5, but then went through a ~1 year period of often using “eated” Marcus et al., 1992 Language: Overregularization “Blocking and retrieval failure” hypothesis: When an adult needs to say a past-tense verb: 1. They try to retrieve the past tense from their memory 2. If that fails, they use conjugation rules Children first use only rule 1, then add rule 2 Children’s memory retrieval is worse than adults, leading to more overregularization errors Much more about language in future lectures Marcus et al., 1992 Summary Children are innately endowed with some basic building blocks of “Core Cognition” Ø Numbers, objects, agents… In addition to learning facts about how the world works, children spend a long time learning skills like: Ø Attending to multiple aspects of a situation Ø Complex theory of mind Ø Rules of the specific language in their household