Week 5 - Chapter 7 Flashcards
What is a concept?
General ideas that can be used to group together objects, events, ideas, qualities that are similar in some way
Used to generalize, organize the world around us, act efficiently
Fundamental concept groups
Who or what: human beings, living things in general, and inanimate objects
Where, when, why: space, time, numbers, causality
Levels of concepts
Apply to anything: height, weight, colour, size
Living things only: eat, drink, grow
People only: shopping, chatting
Category hierarchies
Superordinate - very broad (animals)
Basic - birds, dogs - learn first, right in the middle
Subordinate - specific (eagles, poodles)
When do infants understand who or what?
3-4 months - habituated to pictures of cats, reacted when image switched to dog, lion
Use perceptual categorization - similar appearance, size, colour
Sometimes look at specific features: legs for humans, wheels for vehicles
Key dimension for infants
Overall shape
Beyond infancy: causal understanding
Ability to connect a feature with a function
Wugs and gillies
4-5 year olds more likely to remember categorizations and after a delay when they learned the functions of the animals features
Naïve psychology
A common sense level of understanding of other people and oneself
Desires, beliefs, actions
Properties: invisible mental states, cause-effect relationships (concepts are linked), develop early in life
Rudimentary self consciousness in infancy and toddlers- rudimentary self-other differentiation
In infancy: know they are different from other people - rudimentary self-other differentiation - don’t react to rooting reflex with they touch their own cheek
4 months: basic understanding of what they can and cannot do
18-24 months: recognize themselves in mirror - lipstick
Rudimentary understanding of others
Prefer to look at other peoples faces vs objects
Some understanding others actions are intentional
Preference for moral actions
Understand differences in others - more likely to accept food by someone who speaks own language
Components of naïve psychology beyond the first year
Sense of self is more explicit
Joint attention
Intersubjectivity- common understanding in communication
Theory of mind
Organized understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behaviour
Develops around age 3-4
Naïve psychology in toddlers
2 years: understand that desires lead to actions
3 years: understand relation between beliefs and actions
Still unable to coordinate own beliefs with others beliefs - Piaget mountain task
False belief problems
Tasks that test a child’s understanding that other people will act in accord to their own beliefs, even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect
85% of 3 year olds fail, by age 5 85% demonstrate theory of mind
Children project what they believe - don’t understand that other child can form their own beliefs
Smarties task
Brain development and theory of mind
There’s a special brain region for thinking about other peoples thoughts
Less specialized in children
Reasons for development of theory of mind
Nativists - theory of mind module - hardwired brain mechanism devoted to understanding other humans
Others - interactions with others, general maturation
Theory of mind development through play
Pretend play: make believe activities in which children create symbolic relations - act as if they’re in a different situation, use object substitution, encouraged by interactions with parents
Socio dramatic play: miniature dramas - stories - with other children or adults - enhances narrative skills and understanding of other peoples thinking and emotions
Imaginary friends
63% prevalence
Purpose of companionship, entertainment, help manage emotions - deflect blame, provide comfort
More likely in first born or only children, they watch less TV, verbally skilled, have a more advanced theory of mind
Knowledge of living things- infancy
Infants - 9-12 months
Surprise at inanimate objects moving on their own -> understand self produced motion is a distinctive characteristic of people and other animals
Smile more at people than rabbits, more at rabbits than inanimate objects
Knowledge of living things: older children
3-4 years: children recognize biological processes are independent of desires - acknowledge invisible aspects
5-6 years: deny that humans are animals and that plants are alive
7-9 years: plants are living
Understanding influenced by culture
How do children acquire biological knowledge
Nativists - humans have a biology module - learn quickly about living things because it is important to evolution
Empiricists - learn from observations, through social and cultural information
Kids and robots
Age 5-16
Thought robot liked them, would feel left out if they played with a friend, reported positive affection from robots facial features
Preference for learning form competent robot vs incompetent human
Causality
Unite discrete events into coherent wholes
Infancy
- physical causality influences infants expectations about inanimate objects and helps them remember event sequences
- use causal reasoning for word learning
Preschool
- variables that cause effects should cause them consistently
Space
Early infancy -children can understand above, below, left of, right of
Self locomotion helps with understanding of space
Egocentric spatial representation - coding spatial locations relative to one’s own body - reach for objects closer to them, reference location of objects based on landmarks
Time
Infants can predict temporal sequences
2-4: good at first/last questions, good at after, not before - order of encoding bias
Implications for testimony and interrogations
Time and duration
6 months can distinguish between 2:1 durations
Preschoolers - can tell you what event happened more recently but only when the event happened very recently
Past and future understanding as children enter kindergarten and learn time around a school schedule
Number
Numerical equality - idea that all sets of objects have something in common (two desks, two dogs)
Infants can discriminate 2:1 ratio
8:7 by adulthood
Counting
Count verbally at age 2
5 principles
One-one correspondence - each object must be labelled by a single number word
Stable order - numbers always in same order
Cardinality - number of objects in set corresponds to last number stated
Order irrelevance - objects can be counted in any order
Abstraction - any set of discrete objects can be counted
Cultural differences in counting
Children in china learn to count to 100 earlier
Numerical system different - number rule of 20+1.. starts at number 11
