Wk10 Live lecture Flashcards
What are 3 categories of objects?
Inanimate objects
Animals
People
How do children distinguish between animals and people?
People are like animals but they are similar to us, they have mental states, and display people-specific behaviours
How do children distinguish between inanimate objects and animals?
Animals move, eat, drink, and breathe etc.
What evidence did Ricard and Allard provide in support for children’s understanding of separate categories of objects?
Found that 9/10 month old infants behaved differently in the different conditions.
They would approach and touch the inanimate objects/live rabbit.
They would smile at the unfamiliar person.
They would attend more to the person/rabbit than the toy.
Why would children attend more to the person/rabbit?
Living things capture their attention more and they monitored the live things more than the object because they behaved on their own accord.
What are categories based on?
Infants create categories based on how similar things look to each other (perceptual categorisation)
What does the term habituation refer to?
We look at the length of looking times of infants to understand what infants are interested in
What did Behl-Chadha find about 3/4 month infants categorisation in familiarisation and preferential tests?
Shorter looking times at pairs of familiar mammals. Suggests children are bored and everything they are seeing is part of the same category
Infants had longer looking times in the preference testing phase. Suggests that they look longer at an object from a novel category.
What did Landau (1998) find about how infants categorise objects between 2-3 years old?
Children base their categorisation decisions on shape rather than size or texture.
What are 3 levels of categories?
Basic
Superordinate
Subordinate
Can infants categorise objects using causal information?
Yes. Causal explanations of physical features can lead to better categorisation than physical descriptions alone.
When can children categorise objects?
Early in infancy
What is categorisation often based of in early infancy?
Perceptual similarities
How can older children categorise objects?
Children form more complicate category hierarchies and use verbal explanations and causal reasoning to inform category organisation
When can infants perceive causal connections between physical events?
6 months old - infants understand that moving objects can collide with stationary objects causing them to move.
Have blicket test studies found that toddlers can infer causal relations between things even if they aren’t shown direct information?
Yes. A study using a blicket detector test found that 24 month olds figured out how to turn the blicket detector on by placing the blicket on top of it.
What have findings from more complicated blicket tests found?
Children can hypothesise about inconsistent causal relations. Children who generated more causal function explanations engaged in more hypothesis-testing behaviours
Why might causal reasoning not always happen?
Children are prone to fantasy thinking when causal explanations are not obvious.
Thinking is not always logical.
Can children understand why events in the world occur from a young age?
Yes. By 6 months old infants are attentive to cause and effect relations between objects.
By 24 months, toddlers can infer causal relations based on indirect and probabilistic evidence
Can pre-schoolers demonstrate scientific thinking?
Yes, pre-schoolers can generate hypotheses to explain inconsistent cause and effect relations which shows scientific thought.
How do children begin to understand spatial information?
Crawling and toddling stimulates processing of spatial information
What did Hermer and Spelke do in their disorientation task?
They tried to disorientate toddlers.
The child would observe a toy hidden in the room. They were then spun around with their eyes covered.
What were the findings from the disorientation task?
Children used geometric cues (length of walls) to find the hidden object.
Different coloured walls confused this age groups - the children did not know where to find the toy.
What were the conclusions from Lingwood’s virtual maze study?
As children get older they can use landmarks to locate objects.
By 12 years old, children are good at learning complicated routes.
How did Lingwood’s virtual maze study work?
Experimenter demonstrated the route once and then children were asked to complete the maze by themselves.
What did Lingwood find about the age at which children could successfully navigate the maze?
8 year olds struggled.
10 year olds managed the maze 50% of the time
12 year olds managed the maze 70% of the time
Adults managed the maze 75% of the time
What do habituation studies look at?
Children looking times
Heart rate changes
How do children below 6 months understand time?
They remember temporal order
They can discrimination between short and long durations
How do 4 year olds understand time?
Children can distinguish between recent vs less recent events
Can 4 year olds clearly understand past and future?
No. They get confused
How do 6 year olds understand time?
6 year olds have a better sense of timing of future events (seasons, daily routines)
How do 8 year olds understand time?
8 year olds have a better sense of when past events occurred
How can we assess children’s level of understanding of time when they are above 4 years old?
Ask them to give verbal responses
What studies are used to look at how very young infants understand time?
Habituation studies
How well can infants understand numbers?
At first infants can only distinguish between large number differences (e.g. 1 dot vs lots of dots)
By 9 months they can distinguish less obvious differences
What did Starr et al (2013) find out about infants numerical abilities?
Number sense at 6 months predicts mathematical abilities at 3.5 years
Longer looking at numerically changing vs numerically constant displays indicates better number sense
Can young infants count?
Yes. Wynn did a puppet study and found that at 5 months children have some knowledge of counting because they looked longer when things did not add up
What do nativists propose about our understanding of concepts related to objects, space, time, and number?
We have an innate understanding because it is important in our evolutionary history.
We have specialised modules in the brain which could explain early emergence and rapid development of understanding of these concepts.
Is there evidence for the nativist explanation for conceptual development?
There is little evidence that there are specialised areas of the brain that activate when concepts are being developed/used.
Strong evidence for spatial processing. Brain imaging studies have shown that the hippocampus plays an important role in encoding information about locations.
What do empiricists propose about how understanding of concepts related to objects, space, time and number?
We understand concepts from our own experience and teaching.
Experiences develop the complexity of connections within the brain.
Is there evidence for the empiricist explanation to conceptual development?
Some evidence of cultural differences.
When can infants understand the relative position of objects in space, numerical differences, counting, and time?
By 6 months
When can children use geometric cues and landmarks to locate objects?
First few years. Takes longer to navigate more complicated routes.
When do children understand past and future time?
Over early and middle childhood
