Knowledge Flashcards
Core Knowledge
Child makes tree grow without any adult input - 4yrs old
Children and infants have a surprising understanding of some core domains of knowledge
Early and middle childhood - untutored
understanding of biology - growth and inheritance
Babies - understanding of objects and an intuitive understanding of physics, numbers and simple addition
CORE KNOWLEDGE - understandings had a functional, adaptive role in our EEA
Greek and British empiricists and knowledge
knowledge based on and only occurs from experience - must be perceived by senses to enter the mind
Rationalists and knowledge
some knowledge is available a priori - without having to be taught
Some concepts develop via maturation and not entirely dependent on experiences
Nativists and Empiricists on Knowledge
Nativist and empiricist - knowledge can be thought of like physical stuff - some kind of substance that has to get in your brain
Empiricist - or its already there - nativist.
No nature and nurture - knowledge
Connections are the result of developmental processes
Result from the species-typical development of a child with a human genome and the resources of a species-typical environment
Experience and perceived stimuli can result in changes in the strength of neural connections
Learning
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.
- Not just one kind of psychological adaptation - relies on very different cognitive processes than learning to walk or learning maternal attachment
- Learning is an umbrella term
Many specific learning mechanisms under this term - Learning is not the explanation it is the phenomenon to be explained
Two reasons learning mechanisms are selected for by natural selection
- Taking advantage of regularities in the species-typical environment
Storing info in the environment - not just the genome - may be an efficient way to pass regularity onto the next generation
Over 100 billion neurons but only 30 000 genes in genome
Too many connections for each to be determined by genome
Genome stores info in the environment - if there are regularities that are reliably present in the species-typical environment - efficient to rely on those cues rather than to encode the info in the genome
EXPERIENCE-EXPECTANT LEARNING
- Optimizing the fit with one’s own environment
EEA was not a singular environment
EEA also describes the variance that occurred across environments that our ancestors evolved in
Environments varied with respect to food availability, climate, peace, competition, topographical ecological challenges, fathers presences, non-familial factors
Learning mechanisms allow an individual to optimize his or her compatibility with the current environment.
Adaptive developmental plasticity relies on cues that indicate which life situation and hence which life strategy is optimal for the individual’s conditions
Experience Expectant Learning -
Experience-expectant learning relies on some stimuli that all members of the species encounter in a species-typical environment
Unfolds because of the interplay between reliably present elements of the organism and reliably present elements of the environment
Common in development - Greenough - use environmental info that is ubitquitous - Since the normal environment reliably provides all species members with certain experiences … many mammalian species … take advantage of such experiences to shape developing sensory and motor systems
Developmental theorists - inherit environmental resources
inherit species-typical environment - environment that provides the features the genome needs/expects in order to develop typically
EX. vertical and horizontal lines or terrestrial light - neural development prepares an organism to react to these reliably present stimuli
EX. chicks
2 day old - find pick up and eat mealworms given normal developmental circumstances in a species-typical environment
If chicks are fitted with shoes after hatching - cant see its feet - oblivious to mealworms
Visual access to feet is part of species-typical environment
in order to develop the ability to perceive and pursue mealworms, a chick must be able to see his own toes because a chick’s toes resemble mealworms in size, color, and segmentation
EX. cat needs to see vertical and horizontal lines for normal development of its visual system
In species-typical environment - cat’s visual system will develop typically
EX. Human babies with cataracts - failure to view patterned light - deviation from norms
Sensitive period:
The time period in development during which a specific kind of learning takes place most easily.
Not as extreme as a critical period - rounder edges - no specific day when its done
Easier at a certain age, gets a little harder as you go
Experience-Dependent Learning
Experience-Dependent Learning:
A learning mechanism that responds to individual-specific information.
learning mechanisms designed to optimize the relationship between one’s brain and one’s own idiosyncratic environment
Not just learning attachment but who one’s mother is
Learn not just language in general but specifically one’s local language
EX. Rats - compared brain development in rats reared in a complex, interesting environment to rat pups who were reared in a simple, deprived environment
Reared in an environment with physical challenges and objects to explore made more dendritic extensions on their neurons, more synapses on each neuron, more synapses overall, and developed a thicker cortex and they were better at learning new things later in life
EX. Violinists and cellists (who use their left hand to manipulate strings) - compared to other musicians have more cortical cells in the brain area controlling the left hand - motor cortex and receiving sensory information from the left hand
Those who can read Braille have more cortical cells dedicated to the hand they use to read it with
Relationship btw experience-dependent learning/ expectant and critical periods
Experience-dependent learning is less likely than experience-expectant learning to be restricted by critical or sensitive periods.
Constraints on learning
In order to learn, a machine needs to have a lot of initial structure, something people in the field of development refer to as constraints on learning.
Constraints on learning are the biases, heuristics and privileged hypotheses that an animal uses when acquiring information about the world. The acquisition of knowledge requires structures prepared to acquire knowledge
Evidence shows that not all behaviors are equally trainable using operant conditioning:- mind is not a blank slate - ANIMALS
Reward of seeing a male stickleback fish - condition another male to bite a glass rod but not to swim through a hoop. Conversely, the reward of seeing a female stickleback - condition a male stickleback to swim through a hoop but not to bite a glass rod
A pig or a raccoon can be taught to carry a token and exchange it for food, but if the distance is too long, the pig may stop and try “rooting” and the raccoon may stop to wash his tokens, both species-typical behaviors associated with food
A chimpanzee trained to perform for food may begin making food calls that interfere with her performance
Most or all animal learning is a result of constraints on learning constraints on learning do not just make learning faster; they are actually necessary for learning to happen
Constrained knowledge acquisition
Constrained knowledge acquisition is rapid because the number of hypotheses that have to be tested is limited.
(For example, if you are trying to learn who your mother is, it is best to focus on the people in your environment and save time by ignoring furniture, appliances, and pets)
more constrained knowledge acquisition is, the faster the learning.
fewer constraints there are, the slower learning becomes until it is impossible.
Prepared Learning
Garcia - revealed evidence that the mind might not be a blank slate, equally able to learn whatever association or pairing a teacher might want to teach.
Studying the effects of radiation during the 1950s, rats, when he noticed that a rat seemed to develop an aversion to a food if two things were true:
(a) the rat ate the food just prior to being exposed to radiation
(b) the food was previously unknown to the rat prior to radiation
Relative to those rats who had not been exposed to radiation, those who were radiated drank less sweetened water, and the more radiation the rats were exposed to, the less sweetened water they drank.
The effect, Garcia reasoned, occurred when the radiation-induced nausea was associated with the novel taste of sweetened water. In more natural circumstances, experiencing nausea after eating usually meant that something was poisonous
why were Garcia’s findings surprising? what is prepared learning?
- learning after a single exposure had not yet been documented
- Unusually long delay between the stimuli.
Traditionally the two stimuli that were to be associated with one another were presented within milliseconds.
Evidence of prepared learning: learning that is easier to induce than a random paired association would be because of its importance in our evolutionary history
Violation of the assumption of equal associations
Classical conditioning model assumed that any two stimuli could be paired. A learned food aversion, Garcia discovered, is selective
When Garcia exposed the rats to radiation, which led to nausea, and paired that unpleasant stimulus with a red light, the rats never learned to avoid the red light, but they did learn to avoid food when it was paired with nausea, a learning mechanism that clearly served a valuable function in the EEA.
In another condition in the experiment, Garcia paired sweetened water with an electric shock, but the rats could never learn this association to avoid the sweet water. Instead, they tried to avoid the location in which they got shocked. In contrast, rats could learn to associate the shock with the red light
Perspectives on Knowledge Acquisition
What would Associationists say?
Blank-slate associationist views dominated - until 1970s
Watson and Skinner - malleable infant mind - appealing
humans, like dogs, rats and pigeons, have associationist learning mechanisms.
Parent who takes his child to a store, where the child finds and requests a desired item. The parent initially says no, but the child cries, begs, and escalates her display until it becomes a tantrum. Embarrassed by the child’s display, the parent capitulates and buys the item.
Reward for the child’s behavior - the tantrum - behavior increases
Perspectives on Knowledge Acquisition - What would Piaget say?
Interested in knowledge acquisition - described it in terms of development that was associated with the child’s age
Child encounters various events and stimuli through each stage of development - actively construct meaning of these events and stimuli
Same event could be meaningless or unnoticed by a child at one stage of development but meaningful to the point of developing the cognitive scheme for an older child
Accomodation - events incompatible - update current knowledge to cope with new info- learning process
What would Systems Theorists Say?
Developmental resources - describe everything that is inherited - info in the environment and the brain that is designed to learn from it
Includes info thats reliably recurring - experience-expectant
Idiosyncratic information - experience-dependent depends on
Core Knowledge
Privileged domains of knowledge that children acquire easily by virtue of the developing cognitive preparedness that is specific to those domains
Domain Specificity
Domain Specificity - Specialized psychological processes that have been shaped by natural selection and focus on areas of knowledge that were fitness-relevant in the EEA.
Knowledge acquisition in one domain can be independent of knowledge acquisition in another domain
- Domain as a knowledge system that includes information about what entities are included in the domain
- Rules that describe how the entities in the domain behave.
3.The domain also has limits; it involves knowledge of what entities are excluded and does not offer help in making inferences outside of the domain
Knowledge is domain specific - Human cognition, according to the core knowledge view, is a collection of domain-specific systems of knowledge
Different machinery for language, faces, math
Core domains of knowledge are thought to be human universals, akin to the universality of language acquisition in humans
Intuitive Physics:
Intuitive Physics: Knowledge about physics and objects that develops early in human infants. Infants’ knowledge about objects greatly exceeds Piaget’s estimate.
Object Permanence
Continuity
Contact
Cohesion
Support and Gravity
Object Permanence
Piaget believed that infants younger than 8 months of age did not have object permanence
5m - turn off lights - looking at an attractive object and room goes dark - baby may reach out and search for object - explores place last seen
6m - hears sound of familiar large object - reach out with two hands, small object - one hand
Infant has representation and practical information
Piagets - UNDERESTIMATE
–Methodological limitations
==Recent work - Violation of Expectations Paradigm
If infants respond differently to possible events than to impossible events, this is evidence that an expectation has been violated.
researchers found evidence that infants do have object permanence at 3½ months of age. They have a mental representation of an object, even when the object is out of sight
Continuity - Intuitive physics
Spelke - infants have expectations regarding the continuity, contact, and the rules governing cohesion of objects.
CONTINUITY: Objects are expected to have continuity, meaning that if they travel from one point to another, they must occupy every point in between
Possible event vs. impossible event
Look longer at impossible bc they expect the ball to occupy the space - dishabituated
4M
Contact - Intuitive Physics
The rules of contact require that one object be in contact with another in order to have an influence on its movement.
Infants watched a ball start to move from a stationary state after it had been hit by a moving ball. In another condition, a ball started to move just before it was hit by the moving ball. Six-month-old infants who saw the ball move without contact looked longer.
27-week-old infants watched a launch event in which a small block moved until it was in contact with another block, at which point it stopped and the second block moved off - second contact with no movement - dishabituation for those who saw the launch
first event the infants had perceived a causal relationship, but not in the second event
For objects you infants expected that they have to come into contact to alter behavior but this expectation of contact is not applied to humans
Cohesion - Intuitive physics
3M - Infants also expect objects to have cohesion, meaning they have to remain a unified whole, not crumbling or coming apart when moved.
infants saw a hand come down and grasp the top of the object and then lift the entire object.
Other infants saw the hand come down and grasp the top of the object, - part of the object came along with the hand, and part remained where it was, violating the expectation of cohesion
Looked longer in second
Support and Gravity - Intuitive physics
3m: infants are surprised if unsupported objects don’t fall
5m: infant expects the support to come from underneath
6.5m: infants expect support to contact most of the object’s lower surface
the fact that 3-month-old infants accept a tiny corner of support or contact with the side of the object as support cannot be explained by associationist learning - why?
The infant has never seen an object supported via such contact. There is clearly development unfolding, but the developmental pattern cannot be explained by experience
Occlusion Milestones
2.5 m - responsive to violations of occlusion, containment and covering although variables differ
—Minnie mouse puppet - disappear behind one screen and reappear from behind a different screen - surprised they never appeared in btw
Okay for objects behind occluders to be invisible, but objects that are not behind occluders should be visible.
3.5m should be able to see the tall toy behind the short occluder - only an occlusion event
7.5m perceive height and apply it to a containment event
Occlusion Event:
Occlusion Event: An event in which an object becomes invisible as it moves behind a nearer object, the occluder.
Containment Event:
Containment Event: An event in which an object moves into a container, possibly out of sight.
