1. Cognitive development
Section 4.23

2. Methods Play studies Habituation Eye-tracking High-amplitude sucking
Kids do the darnedest things!
Habituation
Get infant bored, then look for the infant to regain interest
Eye-tracking
Find out where children are looking
High-amplitude sucking
ERP
Listed from easy to complicated

3. Habituation

4. Sample habituation data
dishabituation
habituation
How long infants look
no dishabituation

5. Eye-tracking
What the infant sees
Scene camera
Eye close-up

6. Infant ERP

7. Theories of development
Nativism
Infants are born with rich knowledge of the structure of the world
Core knowledge includes knowledge about events and objects
Constructivism/ Empiricism
Infants are born into a “blooming, buzzing confusion”
Must discover the structure of the world by perceptual and motor experience

8. Piaget’s stages
Sensorimotor: 0-2 (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence)
Preoperational stage: 2-7 (acquisition of motor skills)
Concrete operational: 7-11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events)
Formal operational: 11+ (development of abstract reasoning)

9. Object permanence
This is an example of the A not B task. The oldest method for studying cognitive development, used by Piaget and millions of others.

10. But what do young children know?
habituation
test
Preference for the broken rod indicates perceptual completion

11. Object occlusion

12. Object occlusion
Anticipations and reactions
Reaction: 4 month old

13. Object occlusion
Anticipations and reactions
Reaction: 4 month old

14. Object occlusion: Data
You can train 4mos to perceive occlusion earlier!

15. Early conceptual knowledge

16. Early conceptual knowledge
solidity

17. Early knowledge of events
Occlusion violation
Containment violation
Covering violation

18. More knowledge of events

19. Theory of Mind
The “theory” that others have goals, beliefs, and desires
Young children make mistakes in reasoning about others’ beliefs
Piaget called this “egocentrism” (inability to take others’ perspective)

20. Sally-Ann Task
Sally puts cookies in the basket. She leaves. Anne moves the cookies to the box. Sally comes back. Where will she first look for the cookies?
(up until ~4 years, children say “box”)

21. Early theory of mind Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005
TB = true belief, FB = false belief. This is a tough study, but the idea is that the kids look reliably longer when the experimenter doesn’t look where they think she should. For example, in the TB yellow condition, the experimenter should look at the yellow box (because that’s where the toy is). So they are surprised when the kids look at the green box.
The interesting thing is that in the FB yellow condition, kids still look longer when she goes for the green, even though *that’s where the toy is*.. Supposedly they’re surprised that she’s reaching for the toy because they think she doesn’t know it’s there.. That’s intense, right?
Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005

22. Very early theory of mind?
New goal and path
Understanding Goals
Woodward, 1998
9-month-olds are shown an actor grasping one of two toys
Test: Toys' positions are switched.
New goal: same path, different toy is grasped
New path: same toy is grasped, different path
Looking times are longer for new goal than for new path
Thus, 9-month-olds encode actions as related to goals
5-month-olds show similar but weaker results
No effects shown when claw grasps toy
New goal
New path

23. Piagetian conservation tasks

24. Discussion: how much is too much?
Should we try to “pump up” kids’ cognitive development with products like Baby Einstein?