PSYC 281- Midterm 2

Smith 2013: Pathways in Visual Object Recognition and Early Noun Learning

- 3 principles of development on among sensorimotor development, action on objects, visual object recognition, and name learning. - multicausal or degenerate route - Principle 1 on Visual Object Recognition: Mental Cascade(limits on children's abilities affect development). Ex: Object expectations of unseen sides on 5-8 mo old infants affected by ability to sit steadily NOT with age. Explanation: babies who sit steadily can manipulate objects for sustained periods and can make dynamic visual experiences of objects. - Principle 2: developing organisms solve many overlapping tasks. Ex: baby shaking rattle. 3 systems become activated(motor, vision, and audition) from the same event at the same time. Changes in one system for one task will influence learning and adaptation in another task. - Principle 3: key part of developmental process is constrained ordering of experiences. different species development depended on ontogenetic niches. Ex: in humans, early visual experiences on many faces might be expected to engage, train, and tune, visual face processing. Each new motor skill achieved opens opportunities for new activities that yield new perceptual, cognitive, and social experiences. relevant PATHWAYS to understand learning object names and visual object recognition. - path 1: hands, eyes, and visual object recognition. How 2D views integrate to form expectations about 3D shape. Adults mentally hold or rotate objects and show themselves "planar views". Ex: children generated more planar views when given objects. how they hold object and views they generate may be critical to the specific visual mechanisms that yield object-centered reps of 3D. Better they are at this, they are better at recognizing with sparse part representations. - Path 2 and 3: chilren recognizing space geometric version strongly correlated with vocal size than age,

Children's Information Seeking Experiment

- 4 children, age 1 to 5.5 asked 108 questions per hour - most questions asked were "information seeking" - when parents did not give a great answer, they persisted about half the time until good answer.

duration of memory for single experiences

- 6.5 mo trained (reaching in dark experiment) and 2 years later same experiment without reminders. - compared to controls, experienced children less likely to get upset in dark dn were more likely to reach for toy and be successful)

Spelke & Kinzler 2007: Core Knowledge

- Human cognition founded on 4 systems: representing object, actions, number, and space PLUS social partners. (research on infants, non-human primates, plus other cultures) - based on human phylogeny and ontogeny - CogSci views: mind is flexible with single learning system(Locke & Hume) OR collection of special-purpose mechanisms (Darwin). - Object reps: cohesion, continuity, contact. SOME abilities observed before visual experience (perceive boundaries, predict moment, etc); a single system with limits underlie reasoning about the inanimate world. When attentional limits are stretched, properties to mark distinction fail, while core properties continue to do so. Even the Piraha who have different number systems track objects with set-size limit (about 4 at a time). - Action reps: intentional actions of agents are directed to goals through efficient means. Infants use do not interpret motions of inanimate objects as goal-directed. New hatched chicks are sensitive to what predators or competitors can & can't see; and human adults' mirroring behavior guide adults intuitive moral reasoning. - Number reps: are imprecise, and imprecisions grow with increasing cardinal value; are absract: apply to multiple sensory modalities (arrays of objects, sequenced of sounds, etc); can be compared and combined with addition & subtraction. Infants- adults and primates have these reps with the properties. EX: Munduruku adults and US preschool children with no instruction in mathematics can perform approximate addition and subtraction. -Space & geometry reps: does not represent colors or odors. young children and some animals reorient based on layout geometry, not colored landmarks. - Social: Humans are predisposed to form and attend to coalitions. Preference to in-group over out group. Infants show tendencies early in development. Visual preference to own race, and gender of their caregiver. Pref to familiar language. May guide 'Cultural' learning. - SUMMARY: some things are learned readily, while others with difficulty; mind is not 'massively modular' with collections of hundreds of special-purpose devices. but core systems can form errors. there are objects that are not cohesive or continuous and numbers beyond core domains. Us vs Them can be mistyped in modern world. BUT even core conceptions can be overcome. Ex; 3 mo old prefer to own race is moderated with exposure to other race faces; number concepts change when children learn to count.

deferred imitation

- Piaget says this is a sign of symbolic though, and tied to developments in language, pretend play, and invisible displacements - Study: 3 groups of children (14 and 16 mo); 4 toys; - after observation only, they repeated the action about 1/3 of time 4 months later (this 1-trial learning) which probably means it is explicit memory, not procedural . - adult amnesiacs fail this task. - labels help with deferred imitation

maternal responsiveness

- Prompt, contingent, and emotionally positive responses to the infant or child's behavior - predicts pace of development - most responsive moms reached milestones 4-6 mo before least responsive moms. - in experiment with mother infant pairs, discovered that maternal responsiveness can be taught, and it has a positive influence on early infant development

Siegler & Alibali 2005: Evaluation of Piaget's Theory

- Questions: How can we evaluate cognitive development? How does the theory describe particulars of children at different ages? How useful are the stages to explain thinking? How valid are the general characterizations (preoperationals are egocentric)? - Accuracy: critics say children's inarticulateness creates a falsely pessimistic impression of cognitive abilities. But non-verbal versions of Piaget's tasks reached same expectations of Piaget. BUT their basic understanding may not be evident in PERFORMANCE. (Baillargeon study) - Stages: changes may not be as sudden as Piaget believed; gradual improvements in memory underlie the change. ALSO conservation task may not be one stage, children develop number conservation before weight conservation - differences in experience contribute to this (even adults can fail conservation). They may also be trained to learn more than Piaget thought they could. - Generalizations: if 3 yr olds were completely egocentric, they wouldn't flip a drawing around to show you. Under less demanding versions of 3 mountain task (hiding competing frames of reference), they can take spatial perspectives other than their own. - Piaget's theory may not be accurate, but it does ask the right questions.

developmental cascade

- With increased age there is an improvement in processing speed and this increases what can be processes in working memory resulting to an increase in fluid intelligence. - child fails to master a task most likely going to set up the child up for cognitive failures for later in life - the process by which a child's previous interactions and experiences may spread across other systems and alter his or her course of development, somewhat like a chain reaction

infantile amnesia

- adults remember memories from about 3.5 years. - each year, earliest memory comes from 3.5 mo later in life until it levels out (12-13 year olds endoresed memory they said 2 years prior about 97% of time) - this does not happen because its from long time ago.

infants and televison

- baby videos created lower CDI score, while things like story telling once a day raised it. - nobody really think TV for children is a good idea.

mobile conjugate reinforcement

- baseline ratio: test baseline/training baseline - retention ration: test baseline/post-training baseline - 2 mo olds remember until 1 day of delay, where 6 mo old: 1-2 weeks - detail of encoding changed based on if the pendants are the same, or if crib is different. "in this situation, kicking makes mobile move"

social context of cognitive development

- children seek information from others. - others are inclined to provide it. - there are tradeoffs between taught and discovered information. - attunement between parents and children aids development.

"solo" discovery vs instruction

- instruction focuses preschooler's attention - more than majory play with the demoed toy, but lower number of actions. - when its solo play, number of actions are higher.

Gerken: Rational Decision Criteria for choosing among models of their input.

- learners are model builders: consistent with Bayesian accounts of learning. - Predictions: a learn may entertain that more than one possible model for their inout. If models are contradictory, a rational learner should rule out the contradicted model. EX: one example of a category could be placed in broad or narrow category, while presented with 3 examples of narrower category, children referred to the narroer category. -IN the Gerken experiment, because column stimuli was narrow( AAdi or AdiA) they did not make a broad generalization, while the diagonal was (AAB or ABA), they mae broad generalization. When other were tested on AAdi or AdiA after familiarization with column stimuli, they made narrow generalization. - Interpretations: infants entertained broad and narrow models during familiarization, and it would be suspicious if none of the stimuli violated narrow if broad was the correct generalization. HOWEVER, b/c narrow is a subset of broad, stimuli constant with broad but not narrow sculled rule out the narrower generalization. EX: 10, 20, 100 are divisible by 10 so more likely hypothesis than divisible by 2 because 10 is a subset of divisible by 2. but if 58 is added to the list, you will abandon divisible by 10 & go with 2. - similar outcome in experiment. infants in column+2 generalized to new AAB or ABA. Infants failed to generalize in condition state, indicating that a window of 5 input stimuli is not enough. three counterexamples in the context of the preceding stimuli lead to broader generalization.

Bauer 2010: Infant memory

- long term memory in first 2 years of life - 3 techniques to asses remembering: visual paired comparison (fantz technique) and visual habituation, conjugate reinforcement, and elected and deferred imitation. - Fantz: older infants requires less time during familiarization and recognntion memory over longer delays. Preferential looking is akin to the form of non declarative memory known as priming. priming does not depend on conscious recognition. (it can be preserved with no recollection), so no way to measure whther infants pref to novelty(or familiarity) are due to conscious recollection. so preference may be response to frequency, rather than novelty. change in looking time can be accounted for by repetition suppression. the firing rate repressed before can increase with new stimulus. - conjugate reinforcement:mobile conjguate reinforcement paradigm. after delay, memory is inferred if rate of kicking observed in this test greater than that seen in the baseline. OR train task. Through this, TWO fundamental patterns of age-related differences in performance emerged: speed of learning and length of retention increases with age. Kicking response is sensitive to aspects of mobile as well. a single change in mobile part can disrupt performance. ( most likely non declarative memory, bc declarative memory is flexible). SO these observations have motivated to look elsewhere for nonverbal assessment of declarative memory. - Elicited and Deferred imitation: imitation measures non-verbal measures of memory. Ex: 3 step sequence 'make a party hat'. infants demonstrate memory even when the contexts of learning and memory are distinctively different. imitation tasks are harder for patients with damage to declarative memory brain parts. - over first 2 years of life, ordered recall become more temporally extended and observed. development of the prefrontal cortex and part of the hippocampus reach full maturity later. - more ERP responses to sequences encoded at 10 mo vs 9 mo and more robust ERP is associated with higher recall. - consolidation: immediate ERP indicated that infants encoded the sequences yet variability in encoding did not predict long-term recall. measures of how well the trace had been consolidated counted for the variance in recall. - with development, infants encode faster, remember longer, and memories become more flexible

three perspectives on development

- modularity or core knowledge: innate domain specific mechanisms - rational constructivism or neoconstructivism: learning is powerful and the world has structures (Baye's rule, blickets etc) - culture or natural pedagogy: development is about teaching, community and social context.

degeneracy

- more than one route to same function end - believed to promote robustness in developmental outcome and because its redundant, it provide a kind o insurance against pathway failure.

3 possibilities of infantile amnesia

- perspective - world looks different, so retrieval cues are small when older. - reconstruction - new scripts, different reconstruction of events - autobiography - emergence of self does not come until about 2.

operations

- piaget thinks that these genetic demands were the performance limiting factor. - with Piaget three mountain task, 3 year olds only succeeded 42%, but more succeed with easier versions of this test.

Memory Systems

- procedural memory: implicit, habits ,motor action, "how", spared in amnesia, many trials for learning - declarative memory: explicit; facts, narratives, "what", impaired in amnesia; learning can be one-trial

2 kinds of reminders

- reinstatement: a short amount of training, coming after main training session - reactivation: exposure to some partial feature of the training session, not including having baby's kick move mobile (remove ribbon, jiggle mobile) - we know reinstatement is not just reteaching them because when they take out original training, they do not remember

- significance of reminders

- reminders prolong memory trained at 6 mo old, til infants are 2

Zone of Proximal Development

- the difference between what the child can do alone, and what s/he can do with guidance. - to some degree, parents operate in the ZPD: they adjust their interactions right around, and often just above, what the child can already handle. This called social scaffolding

Infants Seeking Information Experiment

- to test whether they point to get info or they want the object. - when adult says an object is not what it is, the infants do not point as often - more likely to look for information from knowledgable adults

recognition memory in infancy

- typically infants prefer novel stimulus if they remember the old one - test with visual paired comparison task (3 day olds prefer novel stimuli after 2 minute delay; 6 mo olds prefer novel pic after 2 week delay) - performance varies with type of stimulus, exposure time, and similarity of objects, and age

Vygotsky: relationship between Learning and Development

-three major theories. - 1. child development is independent of learning. Ex: Piaget asks questions beyond their reach of intellect. they try to obtain tendencies in pure form independent of learning. If they have not reached capabilities of learning, then instruction is useless. developmental cycles must precede learning cycles. -2. learning is development. process of learning is inseparable. (William James) Development is the accumulations of all possible responses. learning and development occur simultaneously. -3. combination of 1 and 2. learning and development influence each other. there is something in common in theory 1 and 2. Maturation preps learning, then learning pushes the maturation process. But the mind is not a complex network of general capabilities like observation of attention, but more specific capabilities. learning is the acquisition of many specialized abilities. Ons step in learning makes 2 steps in development. ZONE of PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT is the new approach (reject all three previous theories) - it defined the functions that have not yet matures but are in the process of maturation. - 2 levels: actual development level(mental functions that has been established as a result of certain already completed developmental cycles.) and zone of proximal development - ex: children between 3 and 5 have 2 groups of functions: those they already possess and those they can perform under guidance or in groups. The actual is what they can do independently. but children can imitate a variety of action that go beyond own capabilities. - though imitative activity is not an actual mental development. imitation can only happen in their developmental level. - Piaget and others said that reasoning happens in a group as an argument to prove one's point of view before they can perceive and check the basis of his thought. - the developmental process lags behind the learning process, this sequence then results in zones of proximal development. - ex: children learn to reason in groups as arguments before they can internally reason and monitor their thoughts

Siegler & Alibali 2005: Memory Development

3 phases of memory: encoding, storage, retrieval.

episodic memory

A category of long-term memory that involves the recollection of specific events, situations and experiences.

working memory

A newer understanding of short-term memory that involves conscious, active processing of incoming auditory and visual-spatial information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory.

semantic memory

A subdivision of declarative memory that stores general knowledge, including the meanings of words and concepts.

procedural memory

A type of long-term memory of how to perform different actions and skills. Essentially, it is the memory of how to do certain things.

priming

An enhanced ability to think of a stimulus, such as a word or object, as a result of a recent exposure to the stimulus

mirror neurons

Frontal lobe neurons that fire when performing certain actions or when observing another doing so. The brain's mirroring of another's action may enable imitation, language learning, and empathy.

catastrophe theory

Improvements in performance is related to a complex interaction between increases in psychological arousal and cognitive anxiety up to a certain point - when anxiety surpasses beyond that point, performance drastically decreases.

declarative memory

It refers to memories which can be consciously recalled such as facts and events.

starting small hypothesis

Limitations that arise from the immaturity of the neural system constrain the input and, rather than holding back development, play a role in fostering it

implicit memory

Memories we don't deliberately remember or reflect on consciously (capacity for procedural knowledge, priming, and conditioning)

phylogeny

The evolutionary history of a species or group of related species

ontogeny

The history of development of an individual organism during its lifetime.

generative model

Which model hypothesizes that children map adult forms onto theirs (rule writing) and that a child's system is viewed as unique from adult system.

elicited imitation

imitation in which research method in which infants or toddlers are induced to imitate a specific series of actions they have seen but not necessarily done before so that initial learning can be assessed before a delay.

natural pedagogy

we're adapted, evolutionarily, to teach (communication of general knowledge)

human babies expect communicative signals to be about generalizable information, not temporary info.

when an object is reached for, infants notice new location and when it is pointed at, infants notice the new object