Chapter 8: Knowledge Acquisition

Question 1

The A-not-B error

Answer 1

• hide a toy in the same place over a couple trials. Put it in a different location. The baby cannot find the toy that was hidden in plain sight.
• is completely resolved by 24 months

Question 2

Knowledge is not…

Answer 2

physical stuff. It is an organization of neuronal connections

Question 3

Define learning

Answer 3

a change in the brain in response to stimuli that are external to the individual, facilitated by psychological mechanisms that were designed for this purpose.

Question 4

Why do we learn?

Answer 4

• because we can take advantage of regularities in the species-typical environment
• we optimize the fit with our environment, this is efficient

Question 5

What is experience-expectant learning?

Answer 5

a learning mechanism that is designed to respond to species-typical environmental input, usually during a critical period, in order for normal brain development to result

Question 6

What is the difference between critical and sensitive periods?

Answer 6

critical: the time period during which a specific kind of learning can take place if the necessary stimuli are present
sensitive: the time period during which a specific kind of learning takes place most easily

Question 7

Give an example of an experience-expectant learning mechanism

Answer 7

baby chicks look for mealworms in their first 2 days of life unless they wear shoes. Their feet are part of the species-typical environment.

Question 8

Experience-dependent learning

Answer 8

a learning mechanism that responds to individual-specific information

Question 9

Give an example of experience-dependent learning

Answer 9

people who play instruments have greater development in the brain area that controls finger movements.

Question 10

Describe what is meant by “constraints on learning”

Answer 10

biases, heuristics, or privileged hypotheses that an animal uses when acquiring information about the world

Question 11

Garcia’s experiment

Answer 11

• rat learned an association between taste and nausea on one trial (not like CC)
• this was an easier pairing to develop because of prepared learning

Question 12

define prepared learning

Answer 12

learning that is easier to induce than a random paired association would be because of its importance in our evolutionary history

Question 13

Define core knowledge

Answer 13

privileged domains of knowledge that children learn easily by virtue of developing cognitive preparedness that is specific to those domains

Question 14

Domain specificity (define) & domain specific knowledge (6 things)

Answer 14

• specialized psychological processes that have been shaped by NS and focus on areas of knowledge that were fitness relevant in the EEA
• physics, space, biology, numbers, other people, language

Question 15

Continuity, Contact & Cohesion

Answer 15

• continuity: an object needs to occupy every point in its path from A to B. Happens at 3 months
• contact: an object needs to encounter another to influence its movement. Happens at 6 months
• cohesion: an object is expected to stay together when picked up. Happens at 3 months.

Question 16

At ____ infants are surprised if unsupported objects don’t fall
At ____ infants expect support to come from beneath
At ____ infants expect support to contact most of the object’s lower surface

Answer 16

3 months; 5 months; 6.5 months

Question 17

Occlusion, Containment & Covering

Answer 17

At 3.5 months, surprised if tall object is hidden by shorter barrier.
At 7.5 months, surprised if a short container holds a tall object
At 12 months, surprised if a tall object is covered by shorter object

Question 18

Object knowledge applies only to…

Answer 18

objects.
A pile of sand or small particles and liquids do not follow the same rules. Psychologically, there is a border point about the size of a pea.

Question 19

The location of an object is part of its _______

Answer 19

identity

• boy buries toy and retrieves it many times
• after multiple trials retrieves a different toy from that spot
• kid is more surprised if location changes than if object changes
• spatial location used at 5 mons and landmarks at 6 mon but they must be obvious

Question 20

For navigation, infants use _____ while adults use ______& _______

Answer 20

shape; shape & colour

Question 21

The distinction between psychological and biological traits develops around…

Answer 21

7 years.
Before then, children believe that a child will resemble a parent with respect to biological traits but not with respect to social characteristics.
At this age they understand even adopted kids will look like biological parents

Question 22

At _____ individuals understand young animals and plants grow.

Answer 22

4 years old.

• They understand regrowth
• food and water necessary for growth
• Growth is beyond intentional control
• they also understand death

Question 23

Numerosity & Ordinality

Answer 23

Numerosity: the equality or difference of small sets of one, two, or three objects
- develops at 5 months (and 6 months for events and cross-modalities)
Ordinality: the understanding of greater than and less than.
- developed by 18 months.
- even 5 month olds can add and subtract

Question 24

__ ratio at _____ months &

__ ratio at _____ months

Answer 24

1: 2; 6 months
2: 3; 10 months

Question 25

_______ is the cut off for the small number system &

______ is when infants understand magnitude of large numbers

Answer 25

3
- 10-12 month olds choose the greater number of snacks up until 3
- they will not choose 4 over 3. This surpasses the limit of the small and precise number system.
6 months
- but cannot reason about small numbers
* evidence of domain-specificity

Question 26

What would Piaget say about knowledge acquisition? (5 points)

Answer 26

• limited cognitive capabilities in infancy
• no domain-specific knowledge
• preschoolers’ perceptually dominated and pre-causal
• don’t understand numbers before preoperational stage
• one initial take was that due to stage theory, the same event could be meaningful to one child and meaningless to another

Question 27

What would Associationists say about Knowledge Acquisition?

Answer 27

• no domain-specific knowledge
• associative pairing is supposed to be arbitrary
• single-trial learning? never heard of
• initial take was that a child with ASD should not be punished with a time-out because an escape from social demands would actually be rewarding

Question 28

What would Systems Theorists say?

Answer 28

• experience-expectant learning is a perfect example of development
• dev’t resources include everything that is inherited, such as information that is reliably recurring

Question 29

Children have 5 rules for counting

Answer 29

• the one to one principle (each object in a group is counted once)
• the stable-order principle (the way we count is orderly and unchanging)
• the cardinal principle (the last number counted is the total number of objects)
• the abstraction principle (we can count anything, tangible or intangible)
• the order-irrelevant principle (the order in which objects are counted is unimportant)
• they begin to understand these things around 2.5 years