Lecture 4: Cognitive Development

Lecture 4: Cognitive Development

1. Huys et al: conditioning in depression

   • Depression alters reflexive emotional response
     • Feedback loop with the environment; as they become more depressed they reduce social support
       • Conditioning in P.D?
   • Dr B: sceptical about results- why?

2. Explicit Cognition: cognition you are aware of

3. Implicit Cognition: Knowledge you may not be able to describe in words

   • Which is more alive: an animal or a plant?

4. Piaget's Theory of Development

   • Coming from a biological perspective,
     • Evolutionary perspective: how do children adapt to the environment?
   • Schemes
   • Adaption: 3 types
     • Assimilation
     • Accommodation
     • Equilibration
     • Assimilation and accommodation: the way children move from one stage to another
   • Four Stages of devolopment: six substages
     • Sensorimotor Period
       • Stage 1 (Reflexes)
         • Fine tuning of behaviours paired with cognitions
       • Stage 2 (Primary circular reactions)
         • Out of sight, out mind: no object permanence
         • Stage 3 (secondary circular movements)
           • Stage 4 (coordination of secondary circular movements)
             • Integration of secondary schemes
             • A-Not-B Error
               • Piaget: evidence that babies cannot represent hidden objects
               • Controversy surrounding this as error might not be due to inability to represent objectives
                 • Topal et al (2008)
                   • Error might rely on the infants ability to inhibit social training and motor response linked to memory
                     • Infants find it hard to let go of a trained response
             • Stage 5 (tertiary circular reactions)
               • Stage 6
                 • Can represent invisible objects
                   • Symbolic representation
                 • Development of language
           • Applies schemes to other objects
   • Offered first theoretical framework for cognitive devolpment
     • Stressed domain generality
   • Researchers still investigating
   • However, abilites of children underestimated as children often develop mental capacities before they can physically express it
     • Why is this the case?
     • Estimating this: children look longer at thing

5. Principles Guiding Object Understanding

   • Continuity
   • Soliditiy
   • Contact
   • Gravity
   • Inertia
   • Continuity, solidity, contact online earlier than Inertia and Gravity
   • Thinking about objects
     • Do babies expect that objects are solid?
       • Can recognise this, so some object permanence
     • Cross species object permanence
     • Understanding Causality
       • Some evidence that early as seven months old children can have some causal reasoning
     • Understanding Numbers
     • Spatial Knowledge
       • Egocentric spatial representation: realitive to body
       • Allocentric: realaltive to environment
         • More difficult
         • Children at 4 months use this but adults do not
           • Adults seem to use egocentric more
             • Seems to be a switch in how we represent the environment
     • Categorization
       • Empiricist: get exposed to objects and notice similarities
         • Devolop categories based on this
       • Nativist:Babies have bias to expect certain properties to be definitive of category
         • Infants previlege function over form
     • Social vs Nonsocial world
       • Object vs Animate Movement
         • Children do have different representations of objects vs as social agents
         • Goals and beliefs
           • Early as five months babies may be able to differentiate human for non human hand
             • And that humans can have goals but robot, non human, hand cannot
           • Appears that very young infants can imitate the goals of social agents but non social agents
             • But might not be imitating goals may just be responding to social demostrations
         • Ordering events
           • Read in textbook???????