Cognitive Development: Magnitude Representations

Question 1

Understanding Number/Space/Time

Answer 1

Numbers
- As babies age, they can distinguish smaller and smaller ratios, same result with large number operations

Time
- Sensitivity to time appears to emerge early (perhaps at birth)
- Sensitivity to temporal patterns like left, right, left
- Sensitivity to order: which goes first
- Sensitivity to approximate time intervals

Space
- Studies found that young babies (pre-crawling) are ego-centric
- Hide object to baby’s left, turn baby, baby still searches to their left (gets better and better from 4-8 months)

Question 2

Childhood Amnesia

Answer 2

Earliest memory is highly unlikely to be before age 2 or 3

Question 3

Autobiographical memory

Answer 3

Ability to verbally recall memories of a personally-experienced event
- Comes in after decline of childhood amnesia

Question 4

Studying Memory

Answer 4

Visual Recognition Memory
- Familiarize to one stimulus, later examine preference for novel stimulus (if distinguish, suggests remember)
- Older prefer novel, younger prefer familiar

Conditioning

Deferred Imitation

Question 5

3 Principles of Infant Memory

Answer 5

1. Older infants encode info faster
2. Older infants remember info longer
   - Infants humans, like infants rats, show retention length with age
3. Older infants retrieve more easily (Exploit a wider range of cues)
   - Infants’ memory seems really specific
   - So specific they seem to remember everything: their memory easily disrupted by context changes
   - Starts to show more context-insensitivity after 12 months

Question 6

Memory Differences

Answer 6

Better memory when:
- Learning involves verbal description
- Learning occurs across related contexts - supports generalization
- Practice is possible

Individual Differences
- “Short lookers” versus “Long lookers”
- Short lookers do better on recognition, but also language, play, intelligence

Babies with better motor development
- At same age, crawlers tend to outperform non-crawlers on generalization tasks

Bilingual babies
- Do better on generalization tests

Tendency to be surrounded by reminiscing
- Cross-cultural differences
- Multi-generational households

Question 7

Categorization

Answer 7

Responding to different entities from a common class as members of the same category

Question 8

Concept

Answer 8

Mental representation of a category

Question 9

Categorical “Levels”

Answer 9

Subordinate Levels

The Basic Level

Global or Superordinate Levels

Question 10

Categories as Tools

Answer 10

• Allows us to respond to an infinitely large number of totally new things, and to know what they are
• Apply category-level information
• Frees up cognitive resources to do other stuff: don’t have to learn new info about every exemplar

Infants do categorize from 12months +

Question 11

Categorization Development

Answer 11

Newborns showed preference for novel form
- Lots of evidence that newborns categorize speech sounds

Early on, babies only succeed in categorizing items that are quite perceptually similar
- Forming prototypes based on perceptual similarities

Role of language
- Acquired equivalence: items given the same verbal label increase in similarity, items given different labels decrease
- Language maybe not required, but perhaps invites category formation