Conceptual Development

What are concepts?

• General ideas or understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar in some way

• Crucial for helping people make sense of the world

Perspectives

l Nativists argue that innate understanding of concepts plays a central role in development

l Empiricists argue that concepts arise from basic learning mechanisms

Examined in which domains?

Objects, Categorization, Number, Space

Object Properties

Baillargeon: 3-month-olds:

• Have object permanence

• Believe objects are solid

Spelke: 3-month-olds:

• “know” about gravity

• solidity

Space for figures of Spelke’s study:

Physical Causality

• Piaget’s view: No perception of physical causality until 7-8 years

• At this point, they make animism error

• BUT, work with 7-month-old infants suggests that they:

1. perceive events as causal

2. attribute agency and recipiency to different objects

Categorization in the First Year

• Infants form prototypes for simple shapes and faces.

• Quinn et al. (1993): 3-month-olds familiarized with cats preferred novel dog to novel cat.

• Infants sensitive to attribute correlations by 7 to 10 months (Younger and Cohen, 1986)

• Object-examining: 9-month-olds categorize birds & planes, animals & vehicles.

Mandler: Inductive-generalization studies

Infants shown action and allowed to repeat with same category member or different category member

e.g., animal going to be, car starting with key

• Found that 11-month-olds extend "conceptual" properties to other category members.

Insert figures here:

Evidence for animacy

Gergely et al. (1995): an "intentional stance"

Conceptual Development: The Challenge of Understanding the World

Learning about People and Oneself

• Infancy

• Infants develop a “naive psychology, based on

By 5-7 months infants understand that hand are goal-directed:

How?

• Between 1–2 years of age infants learn about intentions

v They desire to act in a certain way

v Their behavior becomes more goal directed

• Around 24 months infants recognize themselves in a mirror and in photos

Beyond 2–5 years play becomes more social

• Pretend play develops around 18 months

v Pretend play is related to a better understanding of others’ psychological functioning, more social maturity, greater popularity, language, and creativity

• Sociodramatic play develops around 2½ years, in which children develop miniature dramas with others

• Interest in board games and other games with rules begins around 5 years of age

Theory of Mind

• Between the ages of 2 and 5 years, children form a theory of mind.

• “Theory of mind” is a basic understanding of how the mind works and influences behavior.

• A child’s theory of mind includes knowledge of perceptions, psychological states, and actions.

False Belief Problems

• Must understand the connections between others’ desires and their actions.

• Three-year-old children have some understanding of how beliefs and desires affect behaviors.

• But: is limited, as shown in their approach to “false-belief problems”

Autistic Children

l Children with autism have problems with false-belief tasks and other tasks that test understanding of the knowledge of other people's minds.

l This is likely because autistic children have more interest in objects than in people

l They lack interest in social relationships.

Where Does Theory of Mind Come From?

l The Theory of Mind Module (TOMM):

o a brain mechanism is devoted to understanding others and that the TOMM matures over the first five years of life.

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l A second theory emphasizes interactions with people;

o evidence is that older children do better with false-belief tasks than do younger children.

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l A third theory: growth of general information-processing skills as essential to understanding other's minds.

l Children with autism do not possess the processing skills necessary to keep track of conflicting information, skills found in other children.

Imaginary Companions

l Taylor (1999: 63% of children interviewed at ages 3-4 and again at 7-8 have imaginary companions at one or both ages

l Imaginary friends included ordinary but invisible children as well as fanciful creatures

l Children with imaginary companions do not differ from those who do not have such fantasy companions with regard to personality or intelligence

l They are more likely, however, ; to watch relatively little television; to ; and to have advanced theories of mind

l Imaginary companions are used not only for enjoyment but also to deflect blame

Spatial Representation

• Infants as young as 6 months can use a landmark to find nearby hidden objects.

• “Dead reckoning”:

• Two-year-olds can use dead reckoning a little, but without straightforward landmarks, children as old as 7 find it difficult.

• Early school years: Route mapping – can remember routes as “turn left”, “turn right”.

• 10 years: configuration knowledge – integrate landmarks and routes

Number

• Numerical equality: The realization that all sets of a certain number of objects have something in common (2 dogs, two cups)

• But only at 3 or 4 years of age: show a comparable understanding of larger sets, like four objects.

Infant Arithmetic?

• Claim of understanding arithmetic is controversial

• Not just number: arithmetic

Alternative explanation?

• A perceptual process known as “subitizing,”?

• .

Counting

l By 3 years: children have means to count, meaning precisely establishing the number of objects in sets larger than three.

· Most 3-year-olds can count ten objects.

· Most 5-year-olds can count to 100.

l Numerical ordering: 5 year olds know relative sizes of the numbers between 1 and 10 and can say which is more, 4 or 6 oranges.