Week 4 Flashcards
Preferential looking
Researchers use behaviour called ‘preferential looking’ as a way to understand infant perceptual and cognitive abilities. There are a few key concepts to understand here:
Habituation is a decreased response to a stimulus after repeated presentation. For instance, if an infant is continually presented with an object, their interest in that object wanes. Preferential looking is a technique whereby an infant is shown something that looks different to an object they are habituated to and they prefer that object. This shows they can distinguish between the two objects.
Conclusions have been drawn from preferential looking experiments about the knowledge that infants possess. For example, if infants discriminate between rule-following and rule-violating stimuli by looking longer, on average, at the latter than the former then it has sometimes been concluded that infants know the rule.
Object permanence
Jean Piaget proposed that the understanding that objects exist even when we cannot perceive them is an important milestone in an infant’s development. Watch the following video where developmental psychologist, Professor Renee Baillargeon, shows this theory in action.
Dual representation
‘Dual representation’ refers the existence of multiple mental representations of a single symbolic entity. Whether or not a child gains insight depends on the level of information provided about the relationship between the symbol and the referent, and a child’s prior experience with symbols.
Categorisation abilities of infants
As infants learn about and remember objects, grouping those objects will help them learn the objects’ names, what to do with those objects, and how the objects will react. Babies have amazing abilities to group objects. By 4 months, babies can group dogs together and recognise that a cat is not the same sort of thing as a dog. This is remarkable when you consider that at 4 months babies don’t know the words ‘dog’ or ‘cat’, and that dogs and cat are very similar. It might be tempting to say that babies ‘know’ the category of cat or dog by 4 months. However, babies only notice such categories under some circumstances.
Older infants (10 to 13 months of age) form more exclusive categories when presented with actual objects to play with when they are given two different objects at one time. When given two identical items at one time, infants form more general categories.
Read Chapter 4 Cognitive development in infancy (Links to an external site.) (Harris & Westermann, 2014, pp. 65–84), which provides a lead-in to the criticisms of Piaget by modern developmental psychologists.
- 24 months developed into a confident toddler who runs around, climbs on chairs and playground slides, enjoys looking at picture books
- cognition is focused on the processing stage - thinking
- fundamental cognitive abilities is grouping objects into categories
- categorisation is here defined as treating a set of discriminable objects as equivalent
- the ability to form categories enables us to reduce memory load by storing common representations for all members of a category and it allows us to form expectations and make predictions about properties that we have not yet observed.
Perceptual Categorisation:
- most of the work on infant categorisation has used the familiarisation-novelty preference method. The facet that infants tend to spend more time looking at new and unusal stimuli than at old and familiar stimuli.
- by using the familiarisation-novelty preference method ithas been shown that young infants who are a few months old can form categories of different objects and animals.
- 3 and 5 month olds show a preference for the novel shape but new borns did not.
- other studies show that 3 and 4 month olds infants can form categories of many animals and real world objects.
- Quinn, Eimas and Rosenkrantz (1993) when they familiarised 4 month olds on cats and then showed them a novel cat and a dog, infants preferred to look at the dog., indicating they had formed a category for cats that excluded the dog.
- this can be only interpreted by assuming that the infancy in the second group formed a category for dogs but considered the novel dog as well as the cat as members of this category.
- Implications - suggests that infants are very good at extracting regularities from their environment, in this type of experiments infants form their categories rapidly and based only on what they have seen in the lab, these early categories are perceptually based, infant categories can be different from adult categories and through development they are shaped to correspond to the adult categories.
- it could be that infants already know that faces are very important and preferentially look ath the face of all the animals they see, possibility, is that while looking at a number of cats, the infats learn that the head is the most diagnostic feature and therefore look at it more as the study progresses
- it therefore seems that animal faces were special to infants even before they took part in the experiment
- Westerlund and Nelson (2006) - measured neural activation patterns corresponding to presentation of the animals at different locations of the scalp for four different conditions. In order to make use of these feature correlations to learn about the world, infants must first be able to detect them. The results of this study was that 4 month olds did not find this animal interesting. Language is the key in going from early perceptual categories from more sophisticated, deeper concepts. The role of language in category formation has therefore also become a very active field of research.
Higher-Level Categorisation:
- Fulkerson and Waxman (2007) - familiarised 6 & 12 month olds on line drawings and dinosaurs with using made up of novel worlds. They do this to they do not want infants response to be influenced by anything they have learned outside the experiment. Infants formed a category when the animals were labelled but not when a tone was played. When different objects share the same name, commonalities between these objects become highlighted so that infants learn which parts of the animal or object are relevant to its identity.
- Criticisms - hard to assess what language offers over and above just showing the ojbects in silence.
- Coley - can language help overcome perceptual similarities - 2 years olds are driven by the visual appearance of the animals and they only answered 42% of the questions for the atypical category. 76% for the typical category. These results changed when the children were given labels for the animals
Object Processing:
- young infants do not appreciate that objects that are moving out of visiotn continue to exist and therefore do not have, as it is called object permanence. 1. Piaget found that infants younger than 8 months do not search for an object that is occluded. Up to 12 months commit to the A-not-B error. 12 months infants are capable of having an object representation that is detached from their sensory and motor actions.
- Doubts - Baillargeon (1985) - drawbridge experiment used violation-of-expectiation looking time paradigm to see if they could find evidence for object permanence already existing in 5.5 mnth olds. Results - infants looked longer at the impossible event than the possible event. Follow up study with 4.5 month olds and 3.5 month olds showed the same results. indicated that the knowledge of infants develops an impressive level of sophistication between 3.5 and 12 months olds. infants learn to represent the height, location and solidity of hidden objects, they learn the support relations between objects placed next to each other or on top of each other, they represent the trajectories of objects and they can do basic maths. Criticism - infants prefer 180d degree rotation as it lasts longer than 120.
- Rivera, Wakeley and Langer (1999) found that infants still preferred to look at 180 degree, concluded that infants preferences for this event could therefore not be taken as evidence of suprise at a physically impossible event but rather, a simple preference for an event wehere the movement lasted longer.
- Bogartz et al argued that in the drawbridge study, infants preferred the 180 degree rotation because they had not seen enough familiarisation trials and were therefore showing a familiarity preference. has been criticised by Kaufman.
- Kaufman - found that infants displayed the temporal cortical activation patterns that are characteristic of maintaining an object representations, but only in the occlusion condition and not in the disintegration condition. They concluded that infants at 6 month of age therefore maintaine d a representation of an object that was hidden from sight but continued to exist.
The A-not-B error revisited:
- Piaget argued that the infant has to learn that the object exists independently of the infants own action towards this object and that the central aspect of cognitive development is to separate the self from the environment. This rules out the explanation that infants merely perseveere at a practised movement and it also rules out Piaagets explanation that the reaching movement to A had become part of the objects identity. Another explanation - infants memory for the location.
- The frontal cortex is involved in planning and guiding actions (executive functions). This art of the brain matures very slowly and is not fully developed until adolescence. Diamongd (1988) frontal cortext is responsible for both maintenance of object representations and for the inhibition of incorrect responses.
- Smith and Thelen (2003) - the two hiding locations stand in competition with each other. Predicts that if infants are allowed to search without a delay immediately after the object is hidden at location B, they should correctly search at B because of the strong visual cue dominates the memory cue. It is clear that this dynamic systems view is fundamentally different from Piagets explanation of the infant not representing he object as separate from the action towards it. In dynamics systems view the action of the infant is the outcome of a combination of the perceptual cues, the past actions of the infant, the similarity of past to present bodily experience and the delay between hiding the object and reaching for it.
Understanding Numerosity:
- Wynn 1992, 5 month olds could compute simple arithmetic operations such as 1 +1 = 2. Found that infants looked longer at the display with 3 dolls, and she concluded that number representations are indeed precise and infants expect 1+1 to be precisely 2 and not 3.
- Authors argue visual differences causes this results as no other study can replicate Wynn
Core Knowledge:
- very young children have sophisticated knowledge of the world have led some researchers to argue that some aspects of knowledge are innate in the form of core knowledge.
- Spelke, 1998 - development of knowledge in this view is linked more to maturation that to experience and is relatively independent from the environment. Opposes Piaget who belived that all knowledge is constructed on the basis of simple reflexes. Criticism - it may not be warranted to interpret looking time experiments as showing that infants possess sophisticated knowledge and the ability to reason. Environmental input is not important for cognitive development
Read 8.2 to 8.4 of Chapter 8 Cognitive development in the preschool years (Links to an external site.) (Harris & Westermann, 2014, pp. 135–147).
- at first sight, preschool children appear quiet illogical in their failure to reason about simple conservation problems or to differentiate their own point of view from that of others.
- that it might be task demands that make children perform poorly on some Piagetian tasks, has recieved a lot of attention.
- It may not be the case that children actually believe that the volume of liquid changes when it is pored from one container to another. Piagets results might have other explanations. 1. young children, who have limited experience with the physical world, may not yet understand relatively complex terms such as ‘same’ and simply make a guess when confronted with an adults wuestion that they do not fully understand.
- Critics - Donaldson (1978) and Siegal (1997). Donaldson argued that the traditional Paiagetian tasks make little sense to the preschool child while Siegal has shown that performanec may be strongly affected by relatively subtle changes to the wording of questions that the childre are asked. Argues that preschool children are much more competent than Piaget gives them credit for. Suggests that Piaget’s testing situations are too abstract and do not connect with yound childrens everyday. Argues that young children understand other peoples feelings therefore socially-based tasks that tap this ability will give a rather different estimate of preschoolers thought processes that Piagets rather abstract tests of intellectual development. Children are not able to sovle the 3 mountains task until they are at least 6. 3 years old 90% correct in placing the doll where the policeman couldnt see. These results seem impossible to reconcile with Piaget theory that young children are egocentric and cannot understand that viewpoint of another person.
- Implications of Donaldson - 1. they may not be aware that the viewpoint of other people may be different from their own. 2. they might know that other viewpoints exist but they may not be able to work out what someone with a different viewpoint may actually see. Results proovide evidecnce that even the youngest children could appreciate that different viewpoints from their own exist meaning they cannot be considered completely egocentric
Verbal Questions:
- misunderstanding key words Karmiloff-Smith (1979) shows that terms such as same, different and all are not fully understood until children are around 6. Siegal (1977) discusses how chilrens respsonses can be influenced not only by how questions are worded but also by conversational context. Seigel shows children aged between 4 and 6 were given a series of conservation problems. Argues for an experimental context in which the child and experimenter can collaborate in their search for the correct answer rather than the traditional relationship in which children may be induced to provide an answer that they know to be incorrect.
Naughty Teddy Study - McGarrigle and Donaldsons - where the experimenter sets out two rows of coins whcih are adjusted until children agree that both contain the same number. Then, under the control of the experimenter a glove puppet moves the coins in onw row that it is longer than the other row. Children are asked whether the two rows contain the same or a different number of coins. - It appears that children at 5 are still having significant problems distinguishing length from number in this type of task.
Expertise and Reasoning:
- Inagaki (1990) Japanese parents by their children a goldfish, children who had them knew more about raising them, had a better understanding of biological processesand excertion as revealed by questions on the effects on the fish over-feeding or of failure to change the water.
- Seigal 1997 - finds basic understanding of contamination, show the ability to distinguish appearance from reality because once the contaminant has been removed the milk looks wholessome, but some children still identify it as contaminated.
- Seigal 1988 shows that preschoolers understand that a scraped knee isnon-contagious and that toothaches are not sent as a mysterious punishment.
Problem Solving:
- significant change from 2 to 6 years of age.
- only around 9 months do they display genuine means-ends analysis (a method of solving problems based on performing sub-goals to achieve the final goal). Developmental change in the number of sub-goals was shown in a study.
- Bullock and Lutkenhaus 1988 - 17 month olds stacked different blocked, 26 month olds were able to build a tower, 32 months produced the correct solution.
- Means-ends problem solving clearly develops significantly in the early toddle years but many important changes in childrens ability do not occur until the preschool period.
- For older children the Tower of Hanoi ( a puzzle often used to study means-ends problem solving, 3 pegs, 1st peg has a series of disks of increasing size, largest disk at the bottom. children move the blocks to the last peg so the end up in the original order.) necessary to identify and achieve the sub-goals that are required to achieve a solution. 5 & 6 could sold the 2 disk problem but not the 3 disk problem.
- Klahr and Robinson 1981 - in the original task it appears that is the need to remember abstract, arbiturary rules, and not the inability to process sub-goals that prevents success for this task, even in 6 year olds.
- Deloache, Miller, Pierroutsakos 1998 - points out means-ends analysis of a problem imposes a daunting cognitive load because the child needs to identify the current state and teh goal state and reason backward from teh goal state to consider the obstacles to achieving the goal and then identify the sub-goals of removing each obstacle.
- the tendency to prefer hill climbing strategies is not restricted to preschiol children.
Reasoning by Analogy:
- can be helpful in problem solving because they allow us to use knowledge we already have to solve a problem in a new domain instead of trying to find a solution from scratch
- Inhelder and Piaget 1964 -believe children are not very good at making analogies.
- Goswami and Brown 1990 - have shown that reasoning by analogy is wqell established by the age for 4 and very simple analogies.
- Brown et al - found that 70% of children who had answered the questions while seeing the solution to the genie problem, spontaneously saw the analogy between the earlier problem and the new one whereas only 20% of the children in the control group who had not answered the questions did so.
Appearance, Fantasy and Reality:
- The appearance-reality distinction was notable investigated by Flavell and his collegues - the majority of 3 year olds gave a similar answer to both questions. It was not before 4 that children gave correct answers. Explained the failure of 3 year olds to answer correctly by suggesting that at this age children cannot hold more than one representation of objects in their mind.
- Sapp, Lee and Muir (2000) distinguished between verbal and nonverbal responses in an appearance-reality task. foudn that 3 year olds couldnt do the verbal task.
- underestimates the true abilites, but others maintain that 3 yearolds have conceptual limiations.
- traditionally the view had been that children confuse the boundary between fantasy and reality (Piaget,1955)
- Woolley and Wellman 1993 - found when 3 and 4 year olds were asked to judge whether an object that they had imagine really existed most correctly said that it did not.
- Harris, Brown and Marriott, 1991 - when children were later questioned about their behavioura they admitted to wondering about the contents of the box.
- Woolley and Van Rect - it seems that there is a gradual development in the ability to evalute evidence and to use context when deciding whether something is realy or fantsastical.
Social Cognition and Theory of Mind:
- the preschool period marks an important milestone in childresn social cognition because between the ages of 3 and 4 acquire what has become known as theory of mind. The eessence of the fasle belief task is that a child is given some crucial info that a secodnd person does not.
- Donaldson (1978) argued that a limitation to Piaget’s work was: (A)
a - The tasks are to abstract for preschool children
b - The tasks test children’s social experiences only
c - Piaget did not test enough children to draw conclusions
d - The tasks were too simple
- A limitation to a study could be a child’s inability to understand the task or question. Annette Karmiloff (1979) showed that terms such as ‘same’, ‘different’ and ‘all’ are not fully understood until children are aged: (D)
a - 4 years old
b - 7 years old
c - 2.5 years old
d - 6 years old
- Piaget’s work showed that a young child’s reasoning ability depends on the child’s specific knowledge about certain domains (i.e. context-specific reasoning)? (TRUE)
a - TRUE
b - FALSE
- Inhelder and Piaget (1964) believed that children are not very good at making analogies. However, Goswami and Brown (1990) have shown that reasoning by analogy is well established by age: (A)
a - 4 years old
b - 7 years old
c - 2.5 years old
d - 6 years old
- The appearance-reality distinction as investigated by Flavell et al. (1993) refers to: (B)
a - A child’s ability to understand something has disappeared in their reality
b - A child’s ability to understand the difference between things or people that are real or pretend.
c - A child’s ability to understand their reflection when standing in front of a mirror.
d - A Child’s ability see the world from someone else’s perspective
DB
This week we explore the cognitive development of children from early infancy through to pre-school years. Currently, there is not a clear consensus on how cognitive development proceeds so continuing research is vital - the more we know, the better we can understand how to support healthy development in children.
As you might imagine though, it’s not always easy to establish what an infant is thinking! This week you will come across an experimental paradigm frequently used to investigate infants’ cognitive abilities - scientists track infant gaze and make inferences on the basis of their observations. For example, it is suggested that an infant will look longer at something which he/she finds surprising and which violates the infant’s expectations about the world. Researchers can then infer the infant’s beliefs about the world they live in.
Preferential looking experiments have been designed to investigate the development of cognitive abilities in infants, a number of which we will be considering this week, including categorisation, object permanence, dual representation (aka symbolic understanding) and number knowledge.
We will then move on to consider the development of cognitive abilities in 2 - 6 year old pre-schoolers, in particular the cognitive abilities of conservation, reasoning, problem solving and theory of mind.
Researchers have come up with novel methods for investigating cognition in older children but it has become apparent that the outcome of experiments can be very dependent on the questions asked! For example, the “three mountains task” designed by Piaget (watch below) has been questioned by subsequent researchers, who believe that the task does not accurately assess children’s abilities.
On the basis of this experiment, Piaget asserted that children did not develop beyond egocentrism until they are 8 years old. Subsequent experiments suggest that children can understand the viewpoint of others at around 3 years of age.
