Suchergebnisse

"What do infants know, and how does the knowledge that they begin with prepare them for learning about the particular physical, cultural, and social world in which they live? Answers to this question shed light not only on infants but on children and adults in all cultures, because the core knowledge possessed by infants never goes away. Instead, it underlies the unspoken, common sense knowledge of people of all ages, in all societies. By studying babies, researchers gain insights into infants themselves, into older children's prodigious capacities for learning, and into some of the unconscious assumptions that guide our thoughts and actions as adults. To share these insights, Spelke distils the findings from research in developmental, comparative, and cognitive psychology, with excursions into studies of animal cognition in psychology and in systems and cognitive neuroscience, and studies in the computational cognitive sciences. Weaving across these disciplines, she paints a picture of what young infants know, and what they quickly come to learn, about objects, places, number, geometry, and people's actions, social engagements, and mental states"--

AbstractFive‐month‐old infants selectively attend to novel people who sing melodies originally learned from a parent, but not melodies learned from a musical toy or from an unfamiliar singing adult, suggesting that music conveys social information to infant listeners. Here, we test this interpretation further in older infants with a more direct measure of social preferences. We randomly assigned 64 11‐month‐old infants to 1–2 weeks' exposure to one of two novel play songs that a parent either sang or produced by activating a recording inside a toy. Infants then viewed videos of two new people, each singing one song. When the people, now silent, each presented the infant with an object, infants in both conditions preferentially chose the object endorsed by the singer of the familiar song. Nevertheless, infants' visual attention to that object was predicted by the degree of song exposure only for infants who learned from the singing of a parent. Eleven‐month‐olds thus garner social information from songs, whether learned from singing people or from social play with musical toys, but parental singing has distinctive effects on infants' responses to new singers. Both findings support the hypothesis that infants endow music with social meaning. These findings raise questions concerning the types of music and behavioral contexts that elicit infants' social responses to those who share music with them, and they support suggestions concerning the psychological functions of music both in contemporary environments and in the environments in which humans evolved.

Experiments using a preferential looking method, a perceptual judgment method, and a predictive judgment method investigated the development, from 7 months to 6 years of age, of sensitivity to the effects of gravity and inertia on inanimate object motion. The experiments focused on a situation in which a ball rolled off a flat surface and either continued in linear motion (contrary to gravity), turned abruptly and moved downward (contrary to inertia), or underwent natural, parabolic motion. When children viewed the three fully visible motions, both the preferential looking method and the perceptual judgment method provided evidence that sensitivity to inertia developed between 7 months and 2 years, and that sensitivity to gravity began to develop after 3 years. When children predicted the future location of the object without viewing the motions, the predictive judgment method provided evidence that sensitivity to gravity had developed by 2 years, whereas sensitivity to inertia began to develop only at 5–6 years. These findings suggest that knowledge of object motion develops slowly over childhood, in a piecemeal fashion. Moreover, the same system of knowledge appears to be tapped both in preferential looking tasks and in judgment tasks when children view fully visible events, but a different system may underlie children's inferences about unseen object motions.

AbstractMature social evaluations privilege agents' intentions over the outcomes of their actions, but young children often privilege outcomes over intentions in verbal tasks probing their social evaluations. In three experiments (N = 118), we probed the development of intention‐based social evaluation and mental state reasoning using nonverbal methods with 15‐month‐old toddlers. Toddlers viewed scenarios depicting a protagonist who sought to obtain one of two toys, each inside a different box, as two other agents observed. Then, the boxes' contents were switched in the absence of the protagonist and either in the presence or the absence of the other agents. When the protagonist returned, one agent opened the box containing the protagonist's desired toy (a positive outcome), and the other opened the other box (a neutral outcome). When both agents had observed the toys move to their current locations, the toddlers preferred the agent who opened the box containing the desired toy. In contrast, when the agents had not seen the toys move and therefore should have expected the desired toy's location to be unchanged, the toddlers preferred the agent who opened the box that no longer contained the desired toy. Thus, the toddlers preferred the agent who intended to make the protagonist's desired toy accessible, even when its action, guided by a false belief concerning that toy's location, did not produce a positive outcome. Well before children connect beliefs to social behavior in verbal tasks, toddlers engage in intention‐based evaluations of social agents with false beliefs.

Participants in social interactions often imitate one another, thereby enhancing their affiliation. Here we probe the nature and early development of imitation-based affiliation through studies of infants' preferences for animated characters who imitate, or are imitated by, other characters. Four experiments provide evidence that preverbal infants preferentially attend to and approach individuals who imitate others. This preferential engagement is elicited by the elements of mimicry in simple acts of helping. It does not, however, extend to the targets of imitation in these interactions. This set of findings suggests infants' imitation-based preferences are not well explained by homophily, prestige, or familiarity. We propose instead that infants perceive imitation as an indicator of valuable attributes in a potential social partner, including the capacity and motivation for social attention and coordinated action.

AbstractResearch on animals, infants, children, and adults provides evidence that distinct cognitive systems underlie navigation and object recognition. Here we examine whether and how these systems interact when children interpret 2D edge‐based perspectival line drawings of scenes and objects. Such drawings serve as symbols early in development, and they preserve scene and object geometry from canonical points of view. Young children show limits when using geometry both in non‐symbolic tasks and in symbolic map tasks that present 3D contexts from unusual, unfamiliar points of view. When presented with the familiar viewpoints in perspectival line drawings, however, do children engage more integrated geometric representations? In three experiments, children successfully interpreted line drawings with respect to their depicted scene or object. Nevertheless, children recruited distinct processes when navigating based on the information in these drawings, and these processes depended on the context in which the drawings were presented. These results suggest that children are flexible but limited in using geometric information to form integrated representations of scenes and objects, even when interpreting spatial symbols that are highly familiar and faithful renditions of the visual world.

AbstractBehavioral research suggests that two cognitive systems are at the foundations of numerical thinking: one for representing 1–3 objects in parallel and one for representing and comparing large, approximate numerical magnitudes. We tested for dissociable neural signatures of these systems in preverbal infants by recording event‐related potentials (ERPs) as 6–7.5‐month‐old infants (n = 32) viewed dot arrays containing either small (1–3) or large (8–32) sets of objects in a number alternation paradigm. If small and large numbers are represented by the same neural system, then the brain response to the arrays should scale with ratio for both number ranges, a behavioral and brain signature of the approximate numerical magnitude system obtained in animals and in human adults. Contrary to this prediction, a mid‐latency positivity (P500) over parietal scalp sites was modulated by the ratio between successive large, but not small, numbers. Conversely, an earlier peaking positivity (P400) over occipital‐temporal sites was modulated by the absolute cardinal value of small, but not large, numbers. These results provide evidence for two early developing systems of non‐verbal numerical cognition: one that responds to small quantities as individual objects and a second that responds to large quantities as approximate numerical values. These brain signatures are functionally similar to those observed in previous studies of non‐symbolic number with adults, suggesting that this dissociation may persist over vast differences in experience and formal training in mathematics.

Abstract Research on navigation has shown that humans and laboratory animals recover their sense of orientation primarily by detecting geometric properties of large‐scale surface layouts (e.g. room shape), but the reasons for the primacy of layout geometry have not been clarified. In four experiments, we tested whether 4‐year‐old children reorient by the geometry of extended wall‐like surfaces because such surfaces are large and perceived as stable, because they serve as barriers to vision or to locomotion, or because they form a single, connected geometric figure. Disoriented children successfully reoriented by the shape of an arena formed by surfaces that were short enough to see and step over. In contrast, children failed to reorient by the shape of an arena defined by large and stable columns or by connected lines on the floor. We conclude that preschool children's reorientation is not guided by the functional relevance of the immediate environmental properties, but rather by a specific sensitivity to the geometric properties of the extended three‐dimensional surface layout.

Abstract Human cognition is founded, in part, on four systems for representing objects, actions, number, and space. It may be based, as well, on a fifth system for representing social partners. Each system has deep roots in human phylogeny and ontogeny, and it guides and shapes the mental lives of adults. Converging research on human infants, non‐human primates, children and adults in diverse cultures can aid both understanding of these systems and attempts to overcome their limits.

Abstract Are abstract representations of number – representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated – a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a puppet) on the basis of numerosity. At 6 months, infants successfully discriminated four‐ versus eight‐jump sequences, when the continuous variables of sequence duration, jump duration, jump rate, jump interval and duration, and extent of motion were controlled, and rhythm was eliminated. In contrast, infants failed to discriminate two‐ versus four‐jump sequences, suggesting that infants fail to form cardinal number representations of small numbers of actions. Infants also failed to discriminate between sequences of four versus six jumps at 6 months, and succeeded at 9 months, suggesting that infants' number representations are imprecise and increase in precision with age. All of these findings agree with those of studies using visual–spatial arrays and auditory sequences, providing evidence that a single, abstract system of number representation is present and functional in infancy.

AbstractA fundamental process underlying navigation behaviour, shown to occur in every species tested, uses geometric properties of the environment for location memory and orientation. Here we employ a new method to ask whether this basic geometric orientation ability is innately predisposed in the brain or depends on specific experiences navigating in a geometrically rich environment. Using the newborn domestic chick as a model system, we present a working memory task testing reorientation towards a filial imprinting object under rigorous controlled rearing conditions. In the absence of any previous exposure to a geometrically rich environment, newly hatched chicks spontaneously recovered their bearings by making use of distances and directional relations to reorient themselves to an artificial social partner. These findings provide evidence for an innate capacity to navigate by the geometric structure of the environment.