week 8

Question 1

Foundational domains for cognitive development

Answer 1

Knowledge of the physical world – objects, events; laws governing their interactions
Knowledge of the social world – interpret and predict people’s behaviour
Knowledge of the kinds of things in the world – e.g., animate vs inanimate entities

Naïve physics: intuitive understanding about objects in the physical world
Objects that are dropped will fall
Solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects

Question 2

What do infants know about objects?

Answer 2

Piaget: not much. They only represent whatever is immediately accessible to their sensorimotor system. infants lack an object concept until around 18 months
Spelke and Baillargeon: Infants have abstract representations of object and some of their properties

Question 3

How can we study what infants know about the physical world?

Answer 3

Violation of expectation paradigm
Infants are shown a physical event
On test trials, they are then shown events that are:
compatible with the event (possible)
incompatible with the event (impossible) – thus violating their expectation

Look longer at the impossible event than the possible event
Taken as evidence of understanding of the physical principle involved

Question 4

Representing spatial relations

Answer 4

5.5 month-olds
Habituated to short or tall rabbit passing behind a wall
Test events: mid-section of wall missing
Possible event: small rabbit passes behind wall
Impossible event: tall rabbit fails to appear above mid-section of wall
Increased looking time compared with short rabbit group
Realize that a tall rabbit should be partially visible when passing behind a short wall
Suggests able to represent relative height

Question 5

Occlusion relations: Object permanence (Baillargeon et al., 1985; 1987)

Answer 5

5 month-olds
Habituated to screen/’drawbridge’ rotated through 180˚
Test events: box placed in path of drawbridge
Possible event: drawbridge stopped on reaching box
Impossible event: drawbridge continued to rotate the full 180˚
Increased looking time at impossible event, despite fact that rotation of drawbridge was same as for habituation
Realize that box should obstruct the movement of the drawbridge
Suggests infants represent the box as continuing to exist, even when they cannot see it

Question 6

Truck & ramp paradigm (Baillargeon, 1986)

Answer 6

Another test of infants’ ability to understand that hidden objects continue to exist (object permanence)

Increased looking time at impossible event (car reappears at end of track)

Suggests infants represented the box as continuing to exist and therefore blocking the car’s path

Question 7

Core knowledge (Spelke et al., 1992)

Answer 7

Infants represent hidden objects (they have ‘object permanence’)
What other kinds of object knowledge do infants have?
Spelke et al. (1992) investigated core constraints on object knowledge

Continuity - objects exist continuously in time and space and only move on connected paths; they do not jump in place or time

Solidity - objects only move on unobstructed paths; no two objects occupy the same place at the same time

Question 8

Continuity & Solidity (Spelke et al., 1992)

Answer 8

2 month-olds

Habituated to ball rolling and stopping at a barrier
Test events: barrier placed in path of ball

Possible event: ball stops in front of barrier
Impossible event: ball appears to have passed through barrier

Increased looking time at impossible event, despite fact that end location of ball was same as for habituation

Realize that barrier should stop the movement of the ball

Suggests infants can reason about an object’s motion being constrained by continuity and solidity

Question 9

Infants smart, toddlers dumb?

Answer 9

Young infants can discriminate between visual events that are physically impossible versus possible
Suggests that infants have knowledge of objects and laws governing their interactions
Why can’t toddlers solve simple problems involving search for a hidden object, even though these problems require the same knowledge that infants seem to have?

Visual expectations may not always guide behaviour?
Reacting after the fact vs prediction/planning?
Need to coordinate knowledge with action?

Question 10

Do infants represent number? (Wynn, 1992)

Answer 10

Same experiment but for subtraction – infants look longer at 2 objects
5-month-olds looked longer at the seemingly impossible event (1 object), suggesting that they were surprised at seeing one object rather than two. Suggests understanding of number?

Question 11

Causal reasoning

Answer 11

Adults use causal reasoning effortlessly and automatically every day

Allows us to reason about physical systems….
why is the photocopier not working?
will this pile of books collapse if I add another one to the top?

… and social systems
wondering why someone is late for a meeting
figuring out why a friend is upset
assigning blame and praise

Question 12

Development of causal reasoning

Answer 12

Piaget: young children ‘pre-causal’; causal reasoning emerges gradually during school years

Today: diverse evidence for causal reasoning in very young children; major developments from 0-5 years

Causal perception in infancy
Causal learning in early childhood
Social causal learning
Active learning and exploration

Question 13

Perception of Causality - adults

Answer 13

How would you describe the display on the right?
Collision/launching events - Michotte (1963)
Pure cause-effect relation: billiard ball colliding with second ball and launching it into motion
Adults perceive “launching” events in terms of causal relations, even if objects are patches of light on a wall
Perceptual system assumes cause-effect relations (even in absence of mechanical connection

Question 14

Perception of Causality: infants (Leslie and Keeble,1987)

Answer 14

6-month-olds’ understanding of launching events
Habituated to either direct launching or delayed launching
Shown launching in one order (e.g. red  green), then same sequence in reverse
Only dishabituated to reverse sequence in direct launching condition

Question 15

Perception of Causality: infants (Leslie and Keeble,1987)

Answer 15

Infants form causal representations of motion events:

discriminate causal and non-causal motion events around 6 months

assign causal roles of “agent” and “patient”

are sensitive to contact relations in causal events

Question 16

Hume’s causal principles

Answer 16

There is no evidence of cause in the world; causality is inferred from the frequent co-occurrence of previously experienced events
Temporal Priority A precedes B in time

Contiguity A and B are contiguous in time and space – must be linked by an intervening chain of contiguous events

Covariation A and B covary in a consistent manner

Question 17

Temporal Priority (Bullock and Gelman,1979)

Answer 17

3, 4, and 5-year-olds
Ball in A, then Jack-in-the box pops up, then ball in B. Which one caused the jack to pop up?
All children chose A

Question 18

Spatial contiguity (Bullock and Gelman,1979)

Answer 18

Introduce a gap, but with same timings
Children still choose A
Temporal Priority > Spatial Contiguity

Question 19

What about toddlers? (Tecwyn et al., 2023)

Answer 19

1- and 2-year-olds
Experimenter performs A, sticker dispenses, experimenter performs B
Toddler interacts with box and retrieves up to 5 stickers

Like pre-schoolers, toddlers act in accordance with the temporal priority principle when making causal inferences
Suggests grasp of temporal priority is present by 12 months of age

Question 20

Causal learning: Blicket detector studies (Gopnik et al., 2001)

Answer 20

Method for seeing how children learn about novel causal relations

Some objects make the machine light up and play music when placed on it

Objects that make the machine go are called “blickets”

Children have to figure out which objects are blickets

Question 21

CAUSAL learning: Blicket detector studies (Gopnik et al., 2001)

Answer 21

Children swiftly learn about a novel causal relation

Use pattern of activation to say which blocks were and were not blickets

From 3 years, children correctly infer that the blue cube is a blicket
However, 3-year-olds show a ‘yes bias’ – tend to also say brown cylinder is a blicket
Change question to forced choice – ‘which one of these is a blicket?’ – even 2-year-olds succeed

Question 22

CAUSAL learning from statistical evidence

Answer 22

Children use statistical evidence to make inferences about causal strength (Kushnir & Gopnik, 2005)

Select block that activates machine 2/3 times than block that activates machine 1/3 times

Question 23

Social causal learning (WAISMAYER et al., 2014)

Answer 23

Even toddlers can learn causal relationships from observing statistical evidence
2-year-olds chose to act on the object that was more likely to produce the effect, even without any verbal instructions

Learned causal structure from observing other people’s actions and use this to generate their own actions to bring about the same effect on the world

Question 24

Exploration & causal learning (Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007)

Answer 24

Children actively and spontaneously intervene on the world to get data to solve causal problems
Confounded evidence: levers pulled at same time; both toys pop up; cannot tell which lever causes which toy to pop up
Unconfounded evidence: levers pulled individually; different toy pops up each time; can tell which lever causes which toy to pop up

Question 25

Exploration & causal learning (Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007) part 2

Answer 25

After seeing evidence (confounded or unconfounded) children given the same toy and a novel toy with 1 lever, and allowed to play freely for 1 min

Strong novelty preference when causal structure is clear
Children override novelty preference for novel toy to discover causal structure of familiar toy