Psych475/575: Cognitive Development

multi-media kids

2007-11-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

during mondays lecture, we briefly were presented with various forms of media that are meant to enrich childrens cognitive development and provide a means of basic education that may be lacking in the home. I wonder what the long term effects of relying on media devices for entertainment and educating our children will be. In the more rescent past (~30 yrs or so) TV has been used as a form of entertainment and education for younger and younger audiences. this is not in itself inherently bad, and is likely good, though it is easy for parents to abuse. Coincidently, over the past 30 years or so, we have seen a sharp increase in childhood obesity, and social problems (ADD/ADHD). Can this be a result of not allowing kids to be kids, and burn off excess energy through providing their own entertainment? This concept came to me this thanksgiving when my 6 yo nephew spent the ENTIRE day infront of the playstation, which both entertained him, and baby-sat him. Is this society trading convenience for parenting? What social lessons are being learned from spending 4+ hours a day watching TV? I feel that parents need to take a more active role in allowing kids to discover the world as it really is (developing naive world concepts) and to allow learning through observing real-life, which is how humans have learned throughout the ages.

Social development

2007-11-28T15:40:00.000-08:00

The lecture Monday of week nine, discussing social cognitions, was really interesting to me. Social skills are vitally important to functioning well, so naturally it is something that likely develops early, and is something that is important to study, at these young ages. Social skills are vital for success, popularity, networking, communication, even survival. Not to mention, it arguably complements any other skill one might have as well. One can be extremely smart, but with out the ability to be socially aware they will not progress as far as they could. Obviously the key to success in social skills is the ability to gage and understand other experience, outside of your own experience. In other words to be able to understand what they know from their vantage point, and based on what they have and have not been present for. This is seen in 12-18 month olds in the barrio study. In addition to being adorable to watch, this is a very important skill to have. In the study babies saw an experimenter looking and talking about a spot on the wall. Some times the spot is visible to them and sometimes it isn’t, in both cases the baby is directed to that spot, through the actions of the experimenter. The ability to ascertain that, when another person has a different vantage point they are able to see different things, seems really basic, but if you think about it this is an important skill. We are very limited in what we can see, and lean on others to help us. This is especially true for babies. They are often less Mobil, meaning that taking cues as to were to go could be very advantageous. Also, if you look at child cognitive development through the Paigetian perspective children learn like little scientists, so the ability to take information of what to explore by reading cues from other people can also be very advantageous. The importance of these findings is also congruent with the sociocultural perspective, in that babies can learn more by using other people’s guidance. If they were left alone they might not be know what to look for. This might also give them clues about what is dangerous as well as interesting. The other study that we talked about, that gave insight into the social abilities of 18month olds is the what’s new study, where 18 month old babies were able to determine which toy an experimenter would want to play with based on what they had been present for, or attentive to. This social skill has important implications to social interacting. It is important to be aware of what others around you are aware of in order to successfully communicate with them. If you assume that others have the same information that you do, it would be impossible to communicate with them. This is just a beginning stage in understanding that other people don’t have the same information you do, and they might also have information you do not. We saw that with the little boy touching the chocolate cake and blaming it on his brother, whom his mother knew was at school, but he didn’t know was at school. It is interesting to see that primitive versions of important social skills develop so early in infants. Because they are so important it is really interesting and important to see how they develop. An understanding of this development can give us insight into how to better facilitate socialization, as well gauge the capabilities of babies.

Curse of Knowledge

2007-11-28T15:29:00.000-08:00

When we discussed false beliefs and the curse of knowledge phenomenon, I thought mainly of differing teaching styles. My finance class is taught by a 70+ older man who lost his outstanding 3 page resume in a study guide that he had prepared for us. I also laugh to myself that someone could be so knowledgeable about a subject but so poor at teaching it. He probably has dreams about finance and is so good at what he does that he no longer has to pay complete attention while he is doing something. The problem is that when he comes into the classroom he doesn’t really turn on. We spend most of our time listening to his life stories and looking at chicken scratch diagrams that he scribbles up on the board. Whenever he asks a question and the whole class doesn’t have the faintest idea what the answer is, he gets this confused look on his face as though we all must have simply forgotten. When no one answers he points to his nonsense diagram where only he sees the answer popping off the board. It wasn’t something that we discussed, but all of this seems to follow in with the hindsight bias. When individuals already know something, they are more likely to argue that they knew it earlier then they did. For an elderly teacher, teaching students a new subject like in my class, the results are pretty disastrous. There are the occasional surprises when you get an older teacher that is really good, but my experience has usually been to learn more from younger teachers. What’s interesting about older teachers, and I guess older people in general, is that they are well aware of how hard it can be too learn new things! Our classroom in Lillis has one of those new projector document cameras, and someone has to go up every class time and turn it on for him. This is interesting because despite his own confusion in a new area, he is incapable of recognizing his students’ ignorance in another. My point is not to rant on old people or my finance teacher, but to point out how to effectively learn, teach, and basically communicate. We all know that the best way to learn something is to teach it, but it may also be that the inverse is true. What if the inverse is true and the best way to teach something is to learn it again. By re-learning you’d have a better chance at identifying the common pitfalls and steering the students around them. This all seems to support a hybrid theory like was mentioned in lecture. We seem to have a more incremental ability when we are younger to learn and teach others, and it seems like this ability gradually gets worse until it appears to resemble the Entity theory.

Intelligence and Theory of Mind

2007-11-28T15:17:00.000-08:00

The article relating inhibitory control and theory of mind really caught my memory. It reminded me of back in my childhood, when I too was developing a theory of mind. I think it took me awhile to learn that other people not only have thoughts and feelings of their own, but that they occasionally differ from mine. One thing that I always used to get in trouble for was comparable to the Whisper task mentioned in the study. I always used to get in trouble when my cousin and I were spending the night together, because I had no concept of whispering. She used to get so mad at me because her mom would have to come downstairs late at night and tell me to be quiet, because other people were trying to sleep. But the idea was preposterous to me. This was just one instance of many, which indicate to me that I may have had a harder time developing a theory of mind than other kids. I also specifically remember in first grade telling the teacher that she was doing something wrong (a math problem she was teaching the class, it seems). I was sent to the office, because I could not be persuaded otherwise. I never did find out which of us was right, except that I think she was probably right because she was the teacher.

The strangest thing about all of this is that while I may not have had a well developed theory of mind, I had a highly developed sense of intelligence. When I was in kindergarten, I was tested and placed in Academically Talented classes, with other children that had performed well on these tests. We all formed a little group together, and we were taught separate lessons from the other children of our age group. It was a very strange experience, and one that after having taken this class, I’m not sure that I would subject my children to. All of my life I was given that generic feedback that I was smart. As I got older, I stopped trying hard to do well in school, and instead got feedback along the lines of “she has potential, if only she would apply herself.” Perhaps my life would have been different if my teachers and parents and family members would have known what they were really doing, when they thought they were being helpful to my well-being.

The reason I mention all of that is because it, along with studies that have been done on the topic, points to the fact that there seems to be a negative relationship between intelligence and Theory of Mind. I was very pleased to see that they were able to draw conclusions between inhibitory control and theory of mind, and would like to see how inhibitory control is related to intelligence. It would make sense that highly intelligent children would have a harder time with inhibitory control, for multiple reasons. The first reason is that, at least in my experience, a high intelligence is often accompanied by a brain that works very quickly. It has taken a lot for me to be able to shift things down enough to actually be able to understand most of everything that happens up there, but perhaps that’s the experience for everyone. Another thing that would make it hard for intelligent children to master inhibitory control is that they are often encouraged by the people around them to explore their intelligence. In my household, it was quite acceptable for me to interject in adult conversations, because they were so amazed that I was able to contribute at all. These sorts of behaviors are exactly what inhibitory control would control. As I’ve gotten older, institutional settings like school and work have indicated to me that these behaviors need to be controlled, and only at that time was I able to master the ability to keep my thoughts inside of my head.

This leads to a similar conclusion that the study came to. In intelligent children, who are observing and commenting on most everything in their environments, it must take some time for them to develop a theory of mind because they have to learn to shut up before they can listen to what other people are saying. All the observation in the world isn’t going to help them to see what others are thinking. Only through discussion can things like desires and beliefs be ascertained. I’m just glad that I, along with most kids, finally learn that there is a lot more to be absorbed through our ears than through our tongues.

Advice

2007-11-28T14:43:00.001-08:00

Monday’s lecture on Applications of Cognitive Development was a lecture that stood out for me. The lecture was interesting to me because I wanted to explain the concepts taught in class to my brother. Over the holiday weekend I had a chance to visit my brother and interact with my niece. During the weekend while I was socializing with him I made a comment to him about how shy my niece was. He explained to me that she was always quite and asked for my advice. I told him that she needs more social interaction with children her age. My initial suggestion was later confirmed when I saw her playing with her cousin and talking with each other. When I brought this to my brother attention, my parents chimed in and stated that she talks all the time at church. Once again I thought that I was on the right track. As I was leaving for home at the end of the weekend, my brother asked me to call him if I thought of anything else. I didn’t think much more of the topic until I heard the lecture on Monday.

The lecture was on two approaches to children learning. The first approach was the “child as scientist” perspective and second was the “child as apprentice” perspective. The first approach is often referred to as the “theory” theory or the Piaget theory. The concept behind this approach is for the child to do the learning and have the parent aid only when needed. The “child as scientist” approach is based off three ideas. The first one giving your child an opportunity to explore and observe things as they happen. The second idea is to answer questions that your child has explanations that lead back to underlying principles. The third idea is to have your child interact with their peers. The other approach that you can have with your child is the “child as apprentice” perspective. This concept is based off interaction with adults. The first point behind this approach is to give your child an opportunity to interact with their parents. The second point is to set up scaffolding concepts for the child. The third point is to have your child participate in cultural relate activities.

After Monday’ lecture, I went home and called my brother to discuss what I just learned. As I was talking with him, I was explaining to him about the different approaches that were discussed in class. I was explaining to him about the ideas and the points of each approach. I give him my advice that he should use a combination of both approaches. The first thing that I recommend to him was to enroll her in a day care system where she can socially interact with her peers. I than advised him to try and include her in activities that he does. The last thing that I recommend to him was to start reading to her. Reading to her will start to simulate her mind with new concepts and she will start to question him about the reading. The reading will also simulate her imagination.

Autobiographical memory and culture

2007-11-28T14:10:00.001-08:00

According to Fivush and Nelson(2003), autographical memory is related to language development. So, Fivush and Nelson(2003) argued that most people have childhood amnesia before age 3, because we have not developed verbal language well enough to describe an event. In addition, Fivush and Nelson(2003) argued that the vividness of the autographical memory depends on how a mother to describe past events. More specific, mothers from Western culture might focus on describing children’s personal emotion and action. On the other hand, mothers from Eastern culture might describe more moral emotion and lessons. Personally, my autographical memory supports Fivush and Nelson(2003) that we need to develop verbal language in order to develop autographical memory. However, I am not certain that culture might directly influence how parents elaborate a past event.

Consistent with Fivush and Nelson(2003), I have very little or nearly no memory before or around age 3. Although I know what I was doing and where I had been before age 3 by seeing photos, I have hardly to recall how I was feeling and what I was doing in detail from photo. Also, when my mom told me that I cried so loud when she placed me in a kindergarten around age 2 and half, but I have no memory about this event. Furthermore, one of my nannies speaks Cantonese and she told me that I knew how to speak Cantonese when I was around age 3. Nevertheless, Cantonese always sounds like another foreign languge to me. In general, my earliest autographical memory is after age 3. It is possible I started to understand more vocabularies in Chinese, which is my mother tone. Consequently, I understand the conversations among my families and I could recall some fragmented past events after I was 3 year old. Nevertheless, my childhood memory is more vivid after age 5. I could recall more vividly that my teacher asked me to sleep during the nap time when I was age 6. Or, I can easily recall that I was crying and sitting on the ground because my mom did not buy the toy for me. By comparing my childhood memory among different stages, I agree that we need to acquire verbal language first in order to encode an event vividly.

Clearly, every mom from different culture has different styles to describe their children’s past events. Nevertheless, I do not agree that mother from Chinese culture described less children’s own activities and emotion in past events. At least, my mom and my aunts describe their children’s own activities and emotions in the past events. Usually, my mom describes that I laughed a lot and I seldom had unpleasant mood when I was a baby. Likewise, my aunts describe that how my cousins behave jealously and angrily when everyone paid more attention to their newborn siblings. Thus, mothers from Chinese culture still pay attention to their children’s own emotion in the past event. Additionally, my mom and my aunts focus on describing their children’s own activities in a past event as well , however, they might not be able to focus on describing their children’s own activities every time when describing a past event. Obviously, parents might not remember past events through time. They probably remembered the past events vividly only if they were impressed. For instance, my parents can recall vividly that my brother got burned by boiling water when he was age 3. On the other hand, my parents could not focus on describing my own activities in other daily past events, because they were distracting by something like their work, TV or talking to others. For instance, parents might not pay much attention to children,if they felt exhausted after they finished work or when they pay more attention to doing the work . So, although the culture might indirectly influence how parents elaborate a past event, how vivid and how much detail parents could recall children’s activities in a past event mainly depends on how much attention parents pay to children at that time.
In short, verbal language development influenced how well we recall a past event in different stages. Futhermore, how parents elaborate a past event would influence how well we recall a past event. However, the cultural and economic ( i.g. bringing work to home was normal for every parent at that time) factor might directly or indirectly influence how well parents recalled the past events of their children.

Can babies learn from Hoover?

2007-11-28T14:10:00.000-08:00

When looking at the video of the Qrio robot and children's reactions at an object that seems to interact with its surroundings we learn that children will attend to and interact with objects that contingently react to them. We also know that children follow eye gaze of objects that appear to be consciously avoiding obstacles. I would be curios to view an experiment in which these theories were combined, would babies follow the "eye" gaze of an electronic vacuum cleaner with two dots on top?
Based on the research we have read the answer would be yes. Electronic vacuums are compacts spheres about the diameter of a frisbee which buzz around your house vacuuming on their won, all the while, specially programmed to avoid running into your furniture. If previous data holds true, if we were to place two "eyes" on top of it, babies would follow it's "gaze". This experiment would be along the same lines as the blob experiment and I find that both of these result sets would be difficult to believe. The thought that babies need so few morphological features in order to elicit an action so crucial to learning as eye gaze seems to be absolutely absurd and very difficult to devote any validity to. A more believable explanation may be that babies attention is drawn to movement of any kind and merely the movement of the direction of two dots is enough to elicit a head turning response; these babies are most likely more observant than we give them credit for and are to discriminate between when a blob moves it's eyes and when even a dog moves it's eyes

Social Cognition: Desires and Beliefs

2007-11-28T11:12:00.000-08:00

In the article, “From simple desires to ordinary beliefs: The early development of everyday psychology”, authors Henry Wellman and Jacqueline Woolley state that “before young children construe human actions in terms of beliefs and desires they understand action only in terms of simple desires.” “Naïve Psychology” also called simple desire psychology, is how younger children understand human action. They can understand that desires motivate behaviors, but not that beliefs can also have an affect. Young children are able to understand their own drives and desires, such as being thirsty. However, drives and desires are different motivational forces. For example, Wellman and Woolley say that drive (hunger) is based on a physiological need and no particular object, but desire (wants an apple) is about the object wanted. Desires are formed through basic emotions such as love, hate and fear, and can be understood without beliefs involved. One must be able to take into account another person’s knowledge of the world in order to understand beliefs. Young children may not understand the intentions of others because they cannot appreciate the fact that others may have different beliefs as their own. For example, two children could be looking for a toy that they desire to play with, yet one might look in the kitchen because they believe they left it there last. The other child might not understand why the other is going into the kitchen, because they believe it is in the bedroom.

Since behavior is “mentalistic” for adults and children older than preschool, it makes sense that language is required to form these mental representations. Children under the age of two are mostly non verbal and therefore not able to understand the beliefs of others. It is obvious that language is needed to be able to organize thoughts and recognize the fact that others have their own beliefs and desires that may be motivated by different circumstances. To understand and to be able to predict the actions of others, there must be a mutual understanding of feelings, emotions, perception and intention. These concepts give clues about other people’s behavior and why they may act the way they do. First a person must be able to perceive their world to form beliefs, and then they must take into account their emotions to form desires. With the understanding of beliefs and desires, a person can act or see why another person may act the way they do. Along with beliefs, desires can motivate potential actions, and therefore an understanding of beliefs is necessary to fully appreciate the actions of others.

Susan C. Johnson, author of the article “The recognition of mentalistic agents in infancy”, says that the mental states needed in order to understand others behaviors have to be inferred by others and not just directly perceived. In the example above, the child that didn’t understand why the other was looking in the kitchen when the toy is usually found in the bedroom was simply perceiving a behavior. They were not inferring that the other child was looking in the kitchen because they knew it was left there last. Mental states are formed through “unobservable” internal states that are directed at the world. With the ability to form internal states, children are then able to see themselves and others as things with minds that perceive and believe different things. With this understanding, people can communicate with each other and comprehend that other’s beliefs may manipulate their behavior and intentions. Evidence of the use of mental states is shown through the ability to reason about false beliefs. If a person can understand that sometimes beliefs may be false, they can recognize the fact that the person is acting a certain way based on their belief of some false information. This can help people better understand others intentions and how desires are different from beliefs.

Applications

2007-11-28T10:49:00.000-08:00

It was briefly discussed in class on Monday, the influence that computers/technology is having on children’s development. Watching television last night, I found myself paying more attention to the leap frog commercials, in which they advertise that children play their video games (educational) before going to bed. I believe I saw about five different commercials each attesting to how these computer and video games can aid in a child’s learning. This prompted to me check out the leap frog web site. They offer toys for children from 6months all the way to high school. Everything that was found in class, I saw true for the toys/video games offered by leap frog. They give the correct answer which doesn’t elicit curiosity in the child and are not a substitute for the parent/adult as teacher. They offer a parent guide for each toy they offer, stressing the importance of the parent as a teacher, and that these toys are merely to aid in the child development by offering a rich environment. This parent guide also offers step by step instructions on the usage of the toy and what aspect of learning it enhances. I think that these toys can be educational and aid in a child’s development, it’s important that parents interact with these toys with their children. Some of the commercials portray these toys as a substitute to teaching that can be done by a parent or adult. When these toys are used in conjunction with a parent’s teachings and guidance they can be beneficial. Looking at this website it made me wonder what kind of theories of intelligence it promotes. What does the computer say when the child does a good job, or solves the problem correctly? Do the programmers or developers take this concept into account when creating these games?

These toys were also offered internationally and in many different languages. I can see how these toys can be more beneficial to children who don’t receive the same parental attention, potentially children in more impoverished situations. I can see this same benefit from children programming as well. I guess something, is better than nothing. These computer games and children’s programming can offer a buffer to children who don’t receive the same cognitive stimulation at home.

I found it interesting how much research went into the development of children programming, particularly Sesame Street. While this programming can be beneficial as well, I think some parents also take this as a substitute, and plop their children in front of the television. I have seen this happen with the child I have mentioned in previous blogs. She spends most of the day being watched by someone who just sits her in front of the television. Whenever I get the opportunity I make sure to interact with her, read to her, and encourage her to use her words. I have learned a great deal in this class that I can apply to my life, when I’m around children or have some of my own.

Recently seasons of Sesame Street from the seventies have been released on DVD with a warning label stating that it was for adults because content may not be suitable for young children. It is interesting how far research regarding children and cognitive development has come, that past episodes of Sesame Street are no longer deemed suitable.

The Computer Tutor.

2007-11-28T09:58:00.000-08:00

When I started writing this post, I intended to reiterate the points that I made in my first post about the relevance and applicability of Piaget’s ideas and principles, even in the face of new research. His idea of developmental stages and his laying down of what the majority of children can and cannot do at each stage has made it possible for programs like Sesame Street to be as effective as it is in educating the masses. This utilization of the different developmental stages is especially important because as pointed out in the article by Lepper et al., the luxury of having a personal tutor is limited to a select few.

I was going on to talk about how I thought that although it is possible that technology may one day come close to being as good a tutor as a human being, I doubted that a machine could ever be equally effective. As Lepper et al. said, the computer might be able to meet the cognitive requirements for tutoring, but the socioemotional aspect to tutoring seems to be a bit more out of reach. I was then listing a few reasons why I thought the socioemotional aspect would unattainable for computers, and they all revolved around the computer not having Theory of Mind. The more reasons I listed, the more plausible the idea of computers having Theory of Mind actually seemed!

This change of heart occurred when I wanted to say that teaching our young was a biological characteristic, and was a task that could not be taken over by an inanimate object. It struck me then that this was a contradiction to what I had said I my last post about psychological and biological mechanisms being distinct. That being the case, it is possible for a mechanical object to be a mentalistic agent, perceive the mental states of other mentalistic agents, and to react contingently even though it is not a live being.

One of the main barriers to a child’s development of Theory of Mind is the level of inhibitory control needed. Theory of Mind has been found to increase when a child’s inhibitory control increases (Carlson & Moses, 2001). This is because the child needs to repress the most salient beliefs and desires available to them – that of their own – and identify the beliefs and desires of others. Computers would not face these problems because for one, they do not have beliefs and desires of their own per se. Even if they did, computers are machines – they should not have any trouble inhibiting their own “mental states” and prioritizing the input they are receiving about their tutees.

Beliefs and desires are sometimes presented inaccurately on purpose. Computers can be programmed to be especially sensitive to social cues such as facial expressions, body language, and even physiological states. All this information combined might give the computer an even better representation of the tutee’s emotional and mental states than would be available to even the most expert human tutors. Thus, modulating a problem’s subjective and objective difficulties “intuitively” would be possible, and maybe even easier.

It is true that with a human tutor, modifications can be made to teaching styles according to the different personalities of different tutees, and this flexibility might be a problem for computers. Something similar might be accomplished, however, by including a personality inventory with the teaching software, and different teaching styles modeled on the styles used by expert tutors can be utilized appropriately. As for creating playful competition, the fact that many computer games are played against computers, and that children are motivated to do so, show that this aspect of human tutoring is achievable in computers too.

Given the rate of technological advancement today, it is possible that children all over the world will be given the opportunity to have one-on-one tutoring sessions with computers, tailor-made to suit their individual needs, relatively soon. When such a computer or computer software is created, it would be interesting to compare these computer tutors to human tutors to see if the biological feature of human tutors plays an imperative role in expert tutoring, or if psychological mechanisms are sufficient.

Child as "Scientist" and "Apprentice", Aren't They a Bit Of Both?

2007-11-28T07:12:00.000-08:00

Throughout this class I have found the idea of children acting as small scientists somewhat fascinating. Just the thought alone that a 10 month old is testing gravity by tossing a stuffed toy from the high chair 30 times in a row is great stuff. I always assumed it was just a simple version of fetch that I was taking part in, when my nephew would make toss after toss, I hadn't a clue that he was doing an investigation.

Some of the points that were made in class gave some support to ideas that until that time I had failed to think of. For example I remember a sand box in my preschool classroom. When I think of preschool children I think of messes, and one doesn't really need to add sand to the equation to see that. But by adding the sand box we were given a jump start to conversion tasks, so it really did have a purpose.

Another point made involved a small child asking question after question, to the point you feel like you are being interrogated by the police. The thing that comes to mind for me here is the scene from "Big Daddy" with Adam Sandler, and the toddler he is taking care of. They are in a rush to make it to McDonald's before they stop serving breakfast, and they encounter a homeless person sitting on the street. The child not knowing what to make of the situation asks the homeless person why he is homeless. The homeless man gives a generic answer and the child responds with "why" and they continue this pattern until the homeless man pretty much gives his life story to Adam Sandler and the child. Even though this was a movie the premise is believable in this scene, the child doesn't understand something and will investigate to reach the answer, I've seen it, and taken part in it before.

But not all the time is the child a "scientist" sometimes they require some help to learn so they are deemed the "apprentice". The best example that I can think of for this is "scaffolding". This occurred the last time my brother brought his kids to town for a visit. I don't have much to entertain small children so they brought some puzzles to work on. His daughter was just starting to work on one, by starting I mean sitting there looking at the pieces not knowing how to get started. Her brother sat down and attached several of the border pieces without saying a word. Jensen took the cue from her older brother and worked on the border before tackling the middle. Without his little bit of help she wouldn't have gotten as far as she did, so I believe that was an example of scaffolding before my eyes.

Another example of the child as the "apprentice" happened the same day as the puzzle incident. In fact it was occurring as Jensen worked on the puzzle. She was coyly told of how hard a puzzle it was and cheered every time she got a piece together with another (I was even encouraged to clap along like I was at some sort of sporting event), and every time the crowd went wild she would just light up as she looked around the room, before diving for another piece. when the puzzle was done her mother was right there to tell her how well she did on that hard puzzle. I believe the emphasis was placed on that particular puzzle, not all puzzles in general (at least I hope so, I'd hate to see her develop some sort of complex like you discussed in class).

Anyways these are just a couple of simple examples of times where I have seen a child as both a "scientist" and "apprentice" so I feel safe to say that children are in fact both.

Computer and Cognitive Development

2007-11-27T22:45:00.001-08:00

Toward the end of Thursday’s lecture, we talked about how computer technology can help children in their cognitive development, and this has reminded me of my childhood experiences with computer facilitating programs. Remember when I was in elementary school, we have a computer class which the class will go to the library to learn to use computer. Of course, the computer back then was really old and I don’t quite remember what program that I played with. However, one interesting thing about the class is that we get to play a simulation game about opening a dinosaur park of your own. And starting from choosing land, organizing the park, buying dinosaur and all other business plan, we would need to decide for ourselves the action that we wanted to take. The game required a lot of hard problem solving skills, especially for elementary students, and it was then I realized that not everyone in the class can successfully master the game, and that not everyone’s cognitive development happens at the same age. Personally, I was one of the students struggling with the game and having difficulty to bring my park’s revenue up to a positive number; however, thinking back now, I think the game helped me in developing problem skills as well as training me to be an incremental theorist. I kept on trying each time I failed to open a park, and eventually, I gained enough experience to successfully managing my own business. This experience with the game taught me that success is not determined by innate ability, but with constantly trying and never giving up. I think this is one of reasons that, even until today, I still follow the incremental theory rather than entity theory.

Social Cognition

2007-11-27T19:50:00.001-08:00

It is astounding how much children understand about the social world. Children are able to differentiate between themselves and those around them. They have astounding knowledge about human agency and what humans can do that non-human objects can do (Sigler & Alibali, 307). Children are able to move from an understanding of the observable physical characteristics to an understanding of internal psychological traits (Sigler & Alibali, 309). Children are also able to understand to some extent the workings of the human mind: such as goals, intentions, desires and expectations (Sigler & Alibali, 313). Younger children tend to have an understanding of others that is based on the child’s experiences and beliefs and desires (Sigler & Alibali, 318). However as they get older, after three years of age, children seem to be able to differentiate between their own knowledge of the world and that of others (Sigler & Alibali, 318 & 319). They also have knowledge of social categories, such as knowledge about gender and race and ethnicity. The belief is that children have gender schemas, which determine what they view as correct behavior and action for a particular gender (Sigler & Alibali, 334). These schemas are developed and refined by their interactions with others in the society (Sigler & Alibali, 335). Children’s understanding of race also seems to be based on schemas of some sort that are refined and developed more through time (Sigler & Alibali, 336). Their understanding of race, ethnicity, and social class has stages with the child moving from a merely physical understanding of these concepts to a more complex understanding of the ways that various different factors interact and how there is great variability within and throughout these categories (Sigler & Alibali, 337). It is astonishing that children can accomplish all of this but that adults often seem to have a difficult time with social cognition. Children are able to take into account the experiences of others in evaluating what those people will believe and how they will react however; adults often do not take the experiences of others into account. This is evident in the conflict between people of different economic classes or different races and genders because people rarely take the experiences of other’s into account. Perhaps this is because we depend on others when developing our schema and concepts about the world around us. If we are not exposed to the experiences of others or are taught that these experiences are not important than we will not incorporate them into our schemas. Not everyone reaches all the stages in understanding of race, ethnicity, and social class and not everyone has as developed a schema for gender as others. Perhaps as children relying on schemas makes sense but as we get older we need to think beyond our schemas or consider the schemas of others and how they differ from ours and modify ours.

Naive theories of intelligence

2007-11-27T17:28:00.000-08:00

The topic that I would like to discuss in this last blog post has to do with Naïve theories of Intelligence. This was pretty interesting for me. I did not know any of this before this class. I really do not agree with the Entity intelligence theory. I am sure that some of this theory is true, but it just does not make that much sense to me. I also feel like this theory could really cripple children’s imitative and drive for school. I feel like if children were labeled with this intelligence then they would underperform children that are classified as Incremental intelligence. I feel that entity intelligence would give certain children an excuse for why they underperform. I also feel that this would only hurt a child if they knew. I just really cannot comprehend this theory because I just cannot understand it. I feel that if you work hard for something that you can achieve it. And under the entity theory intelligence is fixed and does not change. You either have it, or don’t. So why would there be so many people in college if there were people out there that would not benefit from learning? If certain people cannot change how smart they are then why are more people just accepting that they cannot become a genius? I do however; have one piece of evidence in favor of the entity theory. This would be IQ tests. According to researchers your IQ score will stay the same across time. They say that, for the most part, you cannot change your score. It may move up a couple points, (or even move down) but it pretty much stays the same throughout your lifetime. This supports the entity theory. You are born with a certain amount of intelligence and you cannot change that no matter how much you learn, or how much you study. However, I feel that the incremental theory is more correct. It makes much more sense that intelligence is malleable, context dependent, and acquired through experience and hard work. This is how I feel I am. I feel that through hard work I have become more intelligent. Of course it could just be that I was smart to begin with and that just continues. I just feel like the incremental theory fits better. It also makes sense then that within the incremental theory, there is more self-esteem. It seems that people feel better about themselves if they know they can improve something as opposed to “being stuck with what you got.” Again, the answer probably is a mixture of both theories. (Like the nature/nurture debate). There are probably elements of both within intelligence.

Education in schools US versus other countries

2007-11-27T15:57:00.000-08:00

In chapter 11: The Development of Academic skills, Siegler and Wagner explain how children acquire basic educational skills such as writing, reading and arithmentics. They state that "children's educations, as well as theories of cognitive development, depend on the mutual influence of intra- and extra-classroom factors." Children not only learn in school but also learn by their social interactions. Family is a big influence in the development of cognitive skills.

In the U.S. children are expected to learn fast and more emphasizes is given on the amount that is learned rather than teaching at a slow pace with greater understanding on one topic rather than a lot. The U.S. where everything moves fast and where everyone expects to get a fast response with everything they do, education is not at the same level compared to other countries. The U.S. fails when it comes to education and a study conducted by the UNICEF, shows that from 24 nations the U.S. was ranked 18 in terms of relative effectiveness of its education system.

I asked myself, why is that one of the richest countries in the world, where a lot of money is put into education, where primary education is free and where class sizes are not too big, why is it that students in grade school perform worse than other countries?

I did some research and found that one of the main reasons why the US is ranked lower than other countries is because here we focus on procedure learning meaning that we teach many things at once while not really focusing on one particular thing. For example when children are taught to add fraction, they are taught how to do it but not much emphasizes is put in the actual concept of fractions. In other countries emphasizes is given on understanding what fractions really are and they tend to break topics in more depth, teaching less but in more depth can help children understand and gives them the opportunity to rehearse what has been learned and is easier to encode into long term memory.

Another big problem that I think we should address is the time parents spend with their children. Parents are usually away from home and children are left by themselves sometimes unattended and with little parental supervision. These children end up doing other things rather than their homework and when parents come home they are often times too tired or not interested in helping their children. In other countries education is a priority for children. Maybe parents should take aside a few hours for their children to do homework because children not only learn in classrooms but also learn by doing homework. Parents play a big role in children's performance in school. I think parents should teach their children to study and should force them to spend a few hours each day doing some educational activity in order to learn good study habits.

I was born in Peru and went to school both here and there. I remember always being behind my classmates when I moved from the US to Peru, but when I would move back here after spending some time in Peru, I would perform better than my American classmates. It is very surprising for most people since Peru is a third world country but I know for a fact that education there and in other countries is better than in the US.

I also see the difference in the way parents push their children to excel in other countries. In other countries where education is not as available as here, parents tend to push and spend more times with their children doing homework. Students tend to show more ambition and motivation because often times they are rewarded in schools for their performance. There is greater competition to excel in other countries while in the US students tend to have less ambition to excel. Perhaps I am wrong but from what I have experienced , education in the US is not so good unless a child goes to a private school. Not until college does education in the US excel compare to other countries but perhaps we should try to focus more on early education rather than just in universities.

Hopefully some education programs can be developed to improve education in the US and hopefully public school will have the same level of education as private school. I think we should focus on children's education more now because they are the future of our country.

Naïve Theories of Intelligence

2007-11-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

This class has taught me so much about not only child development but also human cognitive development in general. There are so many topics that I want to write about in this last blog, but the topics that stood out to me was the Naïve Theories of Intelligence. Incremental theorists say that intelligence is flexible and is context dependent and is acquired through in experience and hard work. Entity theorists say that intelligence is fixed or stable, resulting on a person either having it or not. I believe it’s a combination of both. I’ve struggled watching some of my friends party the night before an exam while I stay in and study, only to watch them get higher scores than me. So in my case, I would agree with the Incremental theorists simply because the theory of intelligence from the entity theorists perspective would pretty much assume I will never succeed. I have always been the type of person that goes above and beyond with studying but still gets average grades.
I believe my inability to go through school with ease comes from the way I was brought up. We have learned so much about how important family interaction is with a child’s learning and it made me realize the lack of it that came from my family. It just shows how different cultures are when it comes to values and raising a child. I was born in the Philippines and don’t recall ever doing things with my parents such as play games and regular housework with them. My parents were always so busy with work that I ended up spending most my time playing and interacting with my brothers. Then at age six my family moved to Oregon and my transition was a little difficult because my parents didn’t know English very well. So it was hard to go to school ad learn so much but not have what I learned exercised at home.
I think the entity theory of intelligence is somewhat similar to the administration and results of tests in classes. You either do well or you don’t. What it doesn’t account for is how much effort you put into your work. The idea of tests also reminds me of basic computer tutors that say “you right” or “your wrong.” Lepper’s article says that even if a computer could accurately diagnose the student’s affective state and respond to that state there is still a plausibility problem. The plausibility (acceptability) problem is, if the same actions and the same statements that human tutors use will have the same effect if delivered by a computer. The emotional response is taken away if a computer replaces a human and this could cause issues when trying to tutor a child.

I Can’t Tell You What I Remember!

2007-11-27T13:51:00.000-08:00

Although memory has been a favorite topic in many of the psychology courses that I have taken, I have not had memory and language acquisition concepts presented together. These two developmental processes and the way in which they interact can have crucial implications for later treatment of trauma experienced in the preverbal stage of early childhood. Research indicates that memories that may have been formed before a child acquires language will be difficult at best to be described verbally by the child once language is acquired. It seems that the most likely of reasons for this phenomenon is that the memory was not encoded using language and therefore not retrievable using verbal cues, discovering the precise retrieval cues may be problematic.

When an adolescent or even an adult is experiencing inexplicable difficulties in their everyday life, there can be a link to early childhood trauma. Symptoms of mood disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, dysthymia, and major depression often find their roots in the early childhood stress/trauma experienced by individuals. What interests me is how we can begin to treat a client who is unable to recall and articulate in words events that may be contributing to their disorder. Some individuals have flashes of memory, like snapshots in time or just a ‘sense’ that they were abused, neglected, or mistreated as very young children but cannot retrieve the memories. The inability to remember or recall more than scant details of the past may lead to further complications when the client is unable to substantiate their feelings with memories.

I am interested in working with children who have experienced trauma and am aware that simple talk therapy may not be completely effective. I have been investigating alternative ways in which traumatic memories can be accessed in an effort to guide a client toward better mental health. One such alternative to talk therapy is art therapy. The notion behind art therapy is that creative artwork gives clients an additional language to explore their current situation, identify issues, and cope with their feelings. The use of paint, clay and puppets are a few of the ways that children create in art therapy. Art therapy may be particularly effective with preverbal memories because although language originates in the left side of the brain, artwork engages the right side of the brain, which matures and develops earlier than the left/language side. Through use of creativity and the right brain children may retrieve memories, gain insight, and/or be able to ‘describe’ events that have activated trauma responses and abetted a detrimental life course.

If I weren’t already sold on art therapy…the connections that I have made between the developmental concepts of language acquisition and memory would have led me in that direction.

Let's Pretend- More than a Game

2007-11-27T11:02:00.000-08:00

Children often begin to pretend from around the age of 12 months, or when they start talking. There are three different types of pretend play that children engage in: self as vehicle, toy/object as vehicle, or nothing as vehicle. In all of these situations, children ascribe physical or behavioral traits to a person, object, or imaginary being that aren't actually there. For example, in Alison Shawber's guest lecture, we were introduced to a little boy who's pretend identity was Spiderman. When spiderman, the boy pretended to shoot webs from his wrists and jump from building to building (couch to couch). We met a few personified objects, like Lamby Baby, the pregnant lamb, too. We also learned about imaginary friends, one of whom, Elfie Welfie, had rainbow hair and sometimes bossed her creator around. Research with children has shown that pretend play, specifically "role play," is correlated with better performance in many areas of development, such as verbal ability, sociability, creativity, theory of mind, and executive function. A question I wish I'd asked is, "Have there been any long term studies regarding pretend play and adult behavior and beliefs?" Of course, adults can self report on whether or not they played pretend as a child, but they may have insufficient memories of that age to accurately report it all the time. What I want to know is, does pretend play predict important social skills that we value as a society once an individual reaches adulthood, like empathy, cultural sensitivity, charity, ingenuity, diplomacy- all of which, on some level, require us to put ourselves in someone else's place? If we have practice pretending to be someone other than we are, that might make us more able to understand someone else's circumstances. This is related to the Simulationist View, which suggests that we understand what someone else is thinking or feeling by "simulating" that experience in our own mind. If we are able to better simulate what someone else might be going through, that may lead to the above valued behaviors.

We know from experience that not all imagining produces good results- many criminals fantasize about doing harm to others before they carry it out. This pretending does not seem to help them put themselves in their victim's place. But pretend play in a healthy childhood environment seems to be a positive predictor of many mental and social skills. Pretend play may be a tool that parents and schools can use more effectively to benefit children's development.

Social Learning

2007-11-26T17:09:00.000-08:00

Learning is a process that occurs through relationships and interaction with the external environment. The sociocultural theory addresses the effect of a child's social environment on their cognitive development. Lev Semenovich Vygotsky was one of the first researchers to develop sociocultural theory. In this thoery, Vygotsky cites two central ideas which are as follows; "(1) cognitive development occurs in social interaction, and (2) psychological functioning is mediated by cultural tools, including language (Alibali & Siegler 109). " A great deal of research has recently been shifted to focus on cultural differences and what effects these differences have on psychology. In general, most people adopt the beliefs and customs of the culture they are immersed in. One's culture can shape the way they learn about the wrold and their place within it. Community and culture also depict the way a child will spend the majority of their time and what activites they will be exposed to.
Learning is thus very subjective and dependent on the environment in which it ensues. To me this seems to counteract the theories of conceptual development learned in Chapter 8. In an earlier post I discussed biological concepts and my skepticism that they are innately determined. From the biological concepts theory, it is stated that preschoolers eventually come to understand the concept of inheritance without direct instruction on the concept. However, in some Native American cultures where folk lore plays a large part in their belief system, it is believed that humans have animal relatives and can often morph into animals. In such cultures, inheritance is often determined by the will of the gods and is not necessarily genetically based. Their concpet of biology is very different from the concept of biology that I was taught. Thus as seen in sociocultural theory, learning takes place largely through community and social interaction causing it to be a product of nurture over nature.

Social Cognition: Machine VS Human's and their role in learning

2007-11-26T15:21:00.000-08:00

Although some of the topics that apply to social cognition seem to be very obvious I found this subject extremely interesting. Of course humans have evolved to learn how to imitate and observe other people in order to gain new knowledge about the world, but I think that the research involving human vs machine and their roles in learning give a really interesting insight into the way that we interact with the world as children.
While reviewing the lecture slides I couldn't help but find it strange that children treated QRIO as if he were a mentalistic agent yet further on in the lecture we learned that other research had found that children are able to distinguish between hands and tools. Although QRIO behaved and responded in the same ways that mentalistic agents do, he still had the physical qualities of a machine. The tools in which were used to grasp the objects in the Woodward studies also responded in similar ways as the human hand had shortly before it and yet the children were able to distinguish it as an inanimate object. And even more interesting is the fact that the children were unable to learn the same task from a machine that a human had performed previously in the "unfulfilled goal study".
I feel like this information can be beneficial to improving how we teach infants and children novel tasks. I think that in today's society we rely greatly on machine's and these studies prove that children are better able to learn when they are observing real human interaction. By using this information we can come up with new techniques that involve teachers or parents showing them things which aid in children's development. Unfortunately I think that a lot of new toys are being developed to teach kids new tasks that are based on using inanimate objects but this may not be the best way in which the teach them. I think that parents should be aware that children respond much better the observing humans and can imitate their actions much better.
I think that it would also be interesting to see how beneficial some of the new programs that are offered for the TV and computer are to children's development. Do they really learn new skills from these things? Even if they were shown to be learning from these machines I wonder how much more efficient they are than if they were to be taught these things through more conventional ways. It seems to me that human interaction is extremely important and by eliminating that would have negative effects on children's development. Because in today's world we do relay so heavily on machine's I don't see things moving in the opposite direction and so it would be important to continue studies that emphasize the importance of human interaction to child development and learning.

Blog #5 Final Post - Forgotten sexual abuse

2007-11-25T16:57:00.000-08:00

One of the most controversial topics in regards to child development is the existence of false memories. I believe that any memories implicating sexual or physical abuse by an adult should be taken very seriously and investigated immediately. However, overwhelming evidence suggests that children can be easily persuaded and manipulated into believing stories, facts, or narratives that may have never occurred. In the documentary “Capturing the Friedman’s”, a variety of sexual abuse allegations surfaced against Mr. Friedman and his youngest son. Many of the children denied that any abuse supposedly took place while others adamantly accused Mr. Friedman of continuous and detailed sexual abuse. The question is who does one believe if there is minimal evidence except for a child’s testimony? The topic of false memories came up a lot while I was taking a course this summer called Psychology of Trauma. I was most fascinated with those children who denied that abuse had occurred when overwhelming evidence proves that in fact it had. There are a number of theories why children would deny the existence or experience of abuse. One in particular is especially alarming. Jennifer Freyd here at the University of Oregon proposes a theory called Betrayal trauma that may explain why children may truly forget that a traumatic sexual abuse has occurred. An extremely high proportion of children are sexual abused by someone whom they have an emotional attachment with. This person is often their caregiver, parent, friend, or relative. When a child is sexually abused by person they share an attachment relationship with it violates and undermines the trust and power that is in place. Most children depend upon attachment relationships with their caregiver or parent(s) in order to secure a healthy psychological and emotional wellbeing. In order to maintain this attachment relationship they adapt to the abusive situation by “forgetting” the abuse. Children in this situation unknowingly experience psychogenic amnesia of the abusive memories, which allows them to sustain the attachment relationship. Interestingly, many children who initially forgot documented sexual abuse have been known to remember many years later. Often by this time is difficult to prosecute (statute of limitations) and even harder for victims or overcome. Although this theory may help explain the existence of false memories it is not easily applicable for the Friedman case. Many of the children supposedly abused were older and little physical evidence existed which could prove that Mr. Friedman and his son were guilty. Also, many of the children may not have considered Mr. Friedman or his son persons with whom they shared an emotional attachment with although the children likely respected them both. Because of this the male students would have no emotional or psychological need to suppress or “forget” sexual abuse memories. Although the Betrayal Trauma theory may not explain why some children swore by the abuse while others denied that it happened, I personally believe that by the end of the documentary both Mr. Friedman and his son were compelled to tell the absolute truth: that they did in fact sexually abuse some of the male students.

Continuing Cognitive Development

2007-11-24T16:23:00.000-08:00

I find it interesting that the majority of the theorists studied in current developmental psychology focuses almost exclusively on the cognitive development of infants and children. Taken to a literal extreme this would tend to imply that cognitive development ends, or is “accomplished” by the end of the teen years and the beginning of adulthood. While some theorist have begun to focus on the effects of age on cognitive faculties (how abilities deteriorate in old age) there remains a gap between the teen years and the senior years. Cognitive development continues throughout life including the adult years.
One of the pillars of development theory was Piaget. His theories describes cognitive development in stages: the sensorimotor stage (ages 0 –2); the pre-operational stage (ages 2-6); the concrete operational stage (ages 7 –11) and; the formal operational stage of cognition (ages 12 and above). I dispute the limited end stage and profess that there are other landmark ages of cognitive development. I would suggest a stage start at age 18 and would term it the age of responsibility. Another at age 25 corresponding to the beginning of the brain’s decrease in size. And again at age 35, which is the youngest age at which one could become president of the United States, representative of grey matter and wisdom.
More helpful to understanding a lifetime of cognitive development in my opinion, is the developmental stages outlined by Erickson. According to his theories, as opposed to Piaget and others, in each stage of development the person deals with multiple developmental conflicts. One never fully arrives; cognitive development never ends.
How cognitive development changes during the adult years is a neglected area of research in Developmental Psychology. More attention should be paid to the years between 12 and 70.

interviewing children

2007-11-23T16:27:00.001-08:00

In a study done in interviewing techniques by Limberg, et al (2003) interviewers were trained in one or 3 procedure for assesing children form age 6 to 7 , who were interviewed after watching a film about a mother hitting her son. As result, researchers concluded that dolls and memory aids do not help on children's memory recallation, and first open question hurt recall. When interviewer digged more, this implied more suggestions and comfabulation; therefore one uncover incorrect information. They suggest let the children take over and remain silent after doing their first recall. Several studies have tested proceddure on how effective an intervention procedure is well performend, but in the case of the Jessy in the movie shown at class. His parent and him were victim of a lack of knowleage about how the police and intervieres coached and misleaded children in testifying erroneous information. There was even one children who strongly believed he was a victim of sexual abuse, When we was asked if he remembered all the events he described before about being abused at the computer calss, his answer was " no I can't rember" he also said after hypnosis he came out knowing he was abused by these two man. I not only felt sorry for Jessy who went to yell for 13yrs, his parent commiting suicide and a family completly in caos, but these children who were mislead and were condititoned to believe they were victims of abused. The person who was treated with hypnosis, I think was really affected and surely believed he vively had those horrible experiences. I could see in his body language, tone of voice that this hypnosis and interviewing procedure affected his memory and thier emotional state, which it was very harmful for them. Thankfully, interviewers in assesing children testimony are more aware on not only getting erronous info and not adding harmul emotional state to a child.

memories

2007-11-16T16:37:00.001-08:00

Memory is used in all parts of our daily life. The concept of memory is used in nearly all actions that we take part of. It will help us in passing a test to recall certain elements in our lives. There are three elements that go into memory. The first task that goes into memory is encoding. Encoding is when you take in the information that you are attempting to remember. There are two ways to do this: the first being verbatim and the second is gist. Verbatim is the details of the situation and gist is the “essence of the event” (Siegler and Alibali p.228). The second element of memory is storage. The storage part is when the memory is store in your brain. The third part of memory is the retrieval. This is the actual recall of memories. These three parts are needed in order to have a successful memory.

One of my strongest childhood memories is of an accident that I had when I was in the first or second grade. I was playing tag with some friends when I decided to climb the jungle gym. When I reached the top of the jungle gym, I slipped and fell. As a result I received a cut to my head and had to be rushed to the emergency room. Without the use of autobiographical memories I would not be able to recall events from my own life. Although this memory of mine is one of my earliest, research has shown that individuals are able to remember events before this. An example would be toddlers remembering to kick their leg in order to make a mobile move. This is the very basic kind of memory. As children grow older their memory improves and gets better. Even recollection of memories before the age of four is hard to believe.

The recollection of memories for all ages can be altered to suit are own needs. The changing of memories is easiest among young children. Children are able to change their mind about what they remember because they are easily suggestible. Memories can be planted into children mind by the way that we ask them to recall the memory. The questioner can “trick” the children into thinking that something happen when in fact it did not by the way that they ask the question. Another way that children get memories confused is by having to image what happen. They will often confuse a new event with a past event. Or they will combine two past events into one. A third problem with children’s memories is that they can be influence with suggestion by others. I have this memory of taking my mothers keys out of her purse and starting the car when I was a toddler. Everyone swears by this event that it did actually happen. But since I was so young, how much of my memory was the telling of stories by my family.

The recollections of memories are not just needed by the individual, but often times by others. Sometimes children are needed to testify in court. With the ability to be easily suggestible and easily influence, society needs to create a standard for questioning children. As stated in the book, open-ended questions are the best way to question children. Children are less likely to please the questioner and create answers.

Memories are useful in all parts of life. Memories can benefit the person trying to remember things as well as others relying on that other person memory. As we grow older, we start to rely more on our memory. Memories in older people also are more important than anything else.

Theory of mind

2007-11-16T15:39:00.000-08:00

Theory of mind is the understanding that individuals have mental states that not always is accessible to others or the public and this may guide other people behavior. Children from age 4 to 5 years old start recognising that minds are separate and that may hold different thoughts. They understand that beliefs are merely mental representation of reality and start recognizing the public and the self as diferent and are more aware of how other individual can differ in their thoughts and desires. Social experiences can foster the development this theory, such as Pretended play and family.
Pretended play is an activity that prompts children to think about mental states. They start making mental representantions of an object pretending to be another or performing other social roles such as cops, robbers and thier super hero spiderman. Children when use their mental representaition in role play, they start acting, talking and pretending to be someone esle, which help them understand not everyone have the same attitudes, behavior, desires, beliefs and thoughts. Cops and robbers for example are two individuals who are different from one another and have different set of mind; therefore role play helps the child see this difference.
Family can also foster Theory of mind in children by doing family discussions in conflict with other member in their family. For example, how their sibilings might be feeling, what motives, intention and beliefs other siblings. The more often mothers talk about other people's mental states with their infants, toddlers and preschoolers, the more likely children are able to recognize the different mental states of others and develop understanding toward other people set of mind. Also, kids who have older brother are more likely to develop a quicker acquisition of this theory than other childrens are because they learn from their sibling and are exposed to more complex pretended play and interact with older siblings how already are succesful at understanding theory of mind of others, who influence and help their younger siblings to do so.

Pretend Play and Egocentrism

2007-11-16T15:35:00.000-08:00

Regarding Tuesday’s lecture on Pretend Play, I found it interesting to learn that some adults still have imaginary friends. I realize the adult version of the imaginary friend may often take a very different form than the childhood playmate, but my first reaction to this information was surprise and skepticism that adults would continue to maintain relationships with fictional characters.

However, this reminded me of a study I read for another class, describing another child-like thought process that changes in a similar way as the child matures. This was the idea of egocentrism. When my psychology classes have covered this topic, they have taught that this is a stage a child leaves at about age five, and after this point the child/adult no longer interprets the world egocentrically. This study was designed to explore that theory. The main part of the study used a variation of the “Sally doll” experiment, where a doll leaves a room, someone moves a toy she had put away, and the child is asked where “Sally” will look for the toy when she returns. In the variation for adults, there were four boxes, each painted a different color. “Sally” left her toy in one box, and when she left, her friend moved the toy to another box – and moved all four boxes, so when “Sally” returned, she found them in a different order than when she left. Half of the adults were also told where the friend hid “Sally’s” toy. The adults were then asked to assign a probability to each box (0 to 100 percent), showing what they thought the chance was that “Sally” would check that box first to find her toy.

The adults that were not told which box currently held the toy assigned equal probability to all four boxes. The adults that did know the new location of the toy assigned a slightly higher probability to the box that contained the toy. Although the scenario was significantly more complex than the traditional “Sally doll” experiment, it appears that adults also may use some egocentric thought processes. I think the adult version of the invisible friend is similar to this. The child does not completely lose their way of thinking, or replace it with something new – instead, the old behaviors and thought processes are modified and adapted and merged with new, better, and more mature ones. Some studies we’ve read in this class have indicated other areas where adults display similar thinking patters to children, such as determining which side of a scale will go down depending on the magnitude and location of weights. I think it would be very interesting to see the results from similar experiments exploring other thought patterns and behaviors from childhood that are assumed not to exist in adults.

Gender Differences in Child Development

2007-11-16T15:29:00.000-08:00

This class has a lot of overlap with a few of my other classes and I always find it very interesting to relate my classes to one another and to analyze how different ideas and topics can be applied to one another. In my Psychology of Gender class we discuss many of the different ways males and females differ and how they are the same. I am curious how this relates to child development and how gender differences affect the way we each develop. I have noticed in almost all of our readings for this class almost none of them look at developmental differences between boys and girls and almost always rely solely on age of the child instead.

In my Psychology of Gender class we often talk about how most of the differences that we observe between girls and boys are socially constructed. We reward children who follow the sex roles we create for them while we penalize or at least fail to reward children who don't conform to these roles. Parents create and reinforce the differences we observe between girls and boys by the way that they treat their child’s actions. There are also many differing explanations for the gender differences between boys and girls.

Leonard Sax wrote a book called “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” In this book he talks about how a few years ago most experts believed that differences in how girls and boys behave were mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. He said however that it is very hard to hang on to that belief today. An avalanche of research over the past twenty years has shown that sex differences are more significant and profound than anybody guessed. Sex differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated according to Dr. Sax. One of the main examples that he shows of this is that girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and those differences increase as they grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely, boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away to hear the teacher-especially if the teacher is female. These male students are then much more likely to be diagnosed with ADD and given drugs to treat this, which is often unnecessary because the boy simple can’t hear his soft spoken female teacher so she thinks that he is just not paying attention to her.

Sax also discusses how the amygdala is the place known for negative emotions to be held in our brains. He says that girls are able to talk about their feelings sooner than boys because they develop the connection between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex much earlier. This however develops much later for boys, thus showing why they find it hard to discuss their feelings articulately. I am interested to see how this will apply to social interactions that we are learning about next week and how males and females differ in their social interaction. Females tend to have strong close relationships that rely on emotions and feelings, while males close relationships rely more on doing things or activities with another person to build a strong relationship. These gender differences in children are very interesting to me in the developmental process.

Pretending Childhood

2007-11-16T15:24:00.000-08:00

As our guest lecturer, Alison, talked about pretend play in our class on Monday, it brought back some of my memory from childhood. When I was a kid, I loved to tie one end of a jacket, blanket, or large towel around my neck and leave the rest hanging down my back so it would look like a cloak. Then I would run around and jump from place to place, pretending that I can fly with this ‘wing’ that I put on myself. The reason I was pretending to be flying came from the cartoon I was watching around the time, where the super hero had a cloak and flies around to save people.

When I was four years old, my sister was born. And by observing her childhood, I remember that there was a brief period in which she had a doll as her friend, and she would talk to her and hug her during sleep. Sometimes our family even needed to make a space for her ‘friend’ to sit when we are watching TV together. However, unlike me, I don’t remember ever seeing my sister pretend to be some super hero or princesses in her childhood. Comparing my sister’s childhood with mine, I agree with one of the study Alison talked about, that boys tend to have pretend identity while girls tend to have imaginary friend.

While reviewing my childhood experience and my sister’s, I realized that pretend identity or imaginary friend is often influenced by culture and media. The super hero that I was pretending during my childhood was from a Japanese cartoon, which is the reason that I don’t think children in the US at the time would pretend to be that same hero. Moreover, as time changed, the media has also changed. With a lot more new characters from cartoon or other media types, children’s pretending target has changed. Only the classic super heroes, such as Superman and Spiderman, survived and still stayed as the top in children’s pretending list.

Making Childhood memories

2007-11-16T14:59:00.000-08:00

I found the lecture on childhood memories and how children form these memories to be extremely fascinating. I personally do not remember very much from my own childhood except for small random things that really have no relevance. Most children remember events which are extremely emotional such as the birth of a sibling or experiences which they found to be exciting such as a dog having puppies. I feel that since I am a twin and was raised while my mom did day care, that some of these special events that children remember tended to not be as memorable or emotional for me. My family also moved about three times when I was fairly young and using the context-dependent retrieval hypothesis, maybe if I were to return to my old houses I would begin to remember some things that I can not retrieve just simply thinking about my childhood.
My first memories seem to be when I began to learn things like reading with my Grandmother. This to me says that maybe since these times were some of the only events in which I was experiencing something individually without my siblings that they may have been more solidified in my memory. It may have also been that my parents used more of a low elaborate reminiscing style.
Because I am pregnant with my first child I am really glad we discussed ways in which we can help children better remember their experiences. I want to use this high elaborative style so that my child can hopefully make some lasting memories about his childhood which I was not able to make. (Not that I have any animosity towards my parents :) )

Discussion of Memory Recall In Children

2007-11-16T14:41:00.000-08:00

In the article “Culture and Language in the Emergence of Autobiographical Memory” by Robyn Fivush and Katherine Nelson, autobiographical memory and how it forms is discussed through the emergence of language, understanding of self, culture and gender. These authors propose that instead of childhood amnesia being a “barrier” that must be overcome in order to begin creating a “life story”, autobiographical memory is accumulated through socio-cultural development. It is stated that adults can recall memories at the earliest ages of three or four, because the density and level of detail of memories has developed within the child. However, the age can vary among different individuals. I can remember being two years old, and not only tidbits here and there, but a framework and a self awareness that I can still access in my memory today. I can remember floor plans of the many houses we lived in in great detail. Also people such as family members, neighbors, babysitters and friends. In the article, it is stated that adults can recall some details about events as early as the age of two, but it is argued that the child isnt able to effectively tie these memories together unless they are specifically targeted. I disagree with this statement, because I feel I can remember what I was thinking at the time and how I felt. I can recall a framework of daily life, and remember specific events that my parents did not tell me about, or that they didn’t even know in the first place (such as when I was doing something I shouldn’t have been).

I always thought that everyone else could remember the same things that I could, but that is not the case. My little sister, who is two years younger than me, cannot remember anything before the age of seven or eight. What could possibly account for the large range in age of rememberance? Fivush and Nelson claim that gender and culture are factors in the development of memory, but we are both female and raised by the same parents. The memories that she does have from childhood are memories that my parents and myself have created for her. I can remember telling her stories when we were younger about events in our lives, and when we were older, she would talk about these events using the exact same language that I had used when explaining them to her as a child. However, I know she didn’t explicitly remember these events, because she could not further describe them or give any other contextual details except for the things she was told. This might be explained by the presence of a “linguistic scaffold” that my parents and I created for her to help her organize events. Reminiscing about the past can help a child develop the ability to recall events and put them into an organized framework. I found it interesting that the ariticle described an experiment performed by Simcock and Hayne in 2002 that shows the emergence of this phenomenon. They had two and three year old children engaging in activities and then at the intervalls of six and twelve months later, they measured the level of recalled information and what the children could actually recall correctly. They found that the children could provide verbal recall, but all the words they used were words that they had in their vocabulary at the time. This shows that language is an important part of memory recall, because a person must have language to be able to describe an event.

Another point brought up in the article is that a child must be aware of themselves and others who also experience the same events. My sister disagrees with me about events that happened when we were children, but since I am older, I believe that my memory representations are more true to the situation than hers. The disagreements between the recall of the younger sibling versus the older sibling challenged her to understand that memories are just representations that are unique to each person. They depend on the child’s level of development, their persepctive of the situation, and past experiences that may be applied to help shape the memory.

Pretend Play

2007-11-16T14:31:00.000-08:00

There are three types of pretending play. There are self as vehicle, object as vehicle and nothing as vehicle. For instance, a boy could pretend himself as the Spiderman. In addition, it seems that imagined friends could vary from human beings to a green alien. Clearly, the contexts of pretend play might depend on what information that a child has received. For example, it is possible that children in United States are easily to watch a cartoon or hear a story about aliens. So, children might imagine a friends looks like an alien. Children must have enough basic knowledge about human and the world to perform pretend play. Furthermore, based on the knowledge or perception that children have, children would have various contexts of pretend play. So, I would like to share with my experience of pretend play in this blog.

I remembered that I changed the contexts of pretend play with the trend of the media such as movies or animations. When I was around age 5, I liked to watch Kung-fu series movies. My brother and I were fascinated how the main characters killed their enemies by one kick or some fabulous Wu-Shu. Additionally, we were fascinated how main character could jump so high in the movie (If you have watched the movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you would understand what I mean here.) Therefore, during our play time, I usually pretended that I was a person who is really good at using sword. I also used the umbrella to pretend as a sword. In addition, I jumped on the mattress and pretended that I could jump really high like the people in the Kung-Fu movies. Later, when I was into the animation about a girl who has powerful magic, I started to pretend that I have powerful magic and liked to fight with other friends who pretend as devils. In short, my pretend play would influenced by the media.

Furthermore, unlike other children, I had no memory for having an imagined friend before 6. It is possible that I did not remember my imagined friends due to the childhood amnesia. However, I suspected that I did not have any imagined friend before age 6m because it is not necessary for me. Before age 6, I not only had my brother but also had my cousins to be my companions. I also had a group of friends in the kindergarten because I went to the kindergarten around age 2 and half. We hanged out and played together everyday. After my cousins, my brother and my friends who are older than I in the kindergarten went to the elementary school, I started to have an imagined friend. Thus, I think that children would create an imagined friend when they could not find any actual companion.

In conclusion, I am impressed how creative that children’s imagination. And, children’s imagination probably is inspired by the media across culture. Moreover, based on my own experience, it is possible that most of children have imagined friend because they do not have actual companions. Furthermore, I wonder if the imagined friend would relate to the schizophrenia. It seems that most of Hollywood movie portrait that adults who have imagined friend would have the schizophrenia. Recently, I have heard the news that a teenager created an imagined boyfriend due to the sexual abused. So, it would be interesting to investigate the relationship between imagined friend which were created after age 7 or older and the abnormal behavior in the future.

False Beliefs

2007-11-16T13:15:00.000-08:00

Our reading from this Wednesday discussed theory of mind which is achieved by the age of 3 or 4. One of the important aspects of theory of mind is being able to understand intensions and actions of others and yourself, this is called false beliefs. Children can be tested if they are capable of false beliefs through a test called “misleading appearance” task. Children are lead to believe there is candy in a box but once they look in the box there are pencils inside. Five year olds say they expected there to be candy inside and believe that if other children looked in the box they would think there would be candy in the box also. Three year olds on the other hand say they always knew there were pencils inside and they believe that other children would know there would be pencils also. Another task that test false belief is “location change” task. The results are the same between five and three year olds.
In my Social Psychology class we talked about false beliefs and how adults still struggle with false belief tasks. One article I read, by Susan Birch and Paul Bloom, talked about the curse of knowledge can conflict with an adults reasoning of false beliefs. Birch and Bloom investigate if an adult has plausible knowledge of an event, is he or she capable of predicting another person’s false beliefs. The task was much similar to the way the test children’s false beliefs. Participants were randomly assigned to three different groups: ignorance, knowledge-plausible, or knowledge implausible. Participants were shown a picture of a girl holding a violin and standing by four containers. Each container was a different color: blue, purple, red, and green. The second picture they were shown was a different girl holding a violin and there were four of the same containers that were rearranged. Subjects were then told, ‘This is Vicki. She finishes playing her violin and puts it in the blue container. Then she goes outside to play. While Vicki is outside playing, her sister, Denise . . . .” Than they were told different things depending on which group they were in, “Ignorance: ‘‘moves the violin to another container.’’ Knowledge-plausible: ‘‘moves the violin to the red container.’’ Knowledge-implausible: ‘‘moves the violin to the purple container.’ The findings showed, that similar to children, an adult’s own knowledge makes it harder to reason others false beliefs and prediction of their actions, only when it is plausible knowledge. These finds concluded that one’s own knowledge can taint our abilities to reason what other people’s action and beliefs.
I get really excited when two of my classes discuss similar topics because you get different perspectives of the topic. False belief is a complex theory of the mind and the findings about adult’s capabilities on these tasks shed light on how children and adults social cognition isn’t much different.

ICs

2007-11-16T12:38:00.000-08:00

I was really excited when Alison brought Calvin and Hobbes into lecture on Monday. I had a little moment in class when I remembered how sad I was when I realized that Hobbes wasn’t actually a real tiger, and that only Calvin could interact with him. I don’t remember having an imaginary friend myself, or really having a pretend identity (beyond the occasional Werewolf over Halloween), but I read as much Calvin and Hobbes as I could when I was younger. It was mentioned during the lecture how kids may use ICs to test the waters in certain situations, like when something has been broken, but I think that they could have a lot more benefits then just being a fall-guy. Just like our orienting abilities that we discussed earlier this term, I think that as adults we take our inner voice and our familiarity with it for granted. I know that when I wake up in the morning and part of me wants to stay warm, and the other part knows I need to go to class or work, that these aren’t two different people inside my head. I’m comfortable with the idea that I can have multiple desires and essentially a conversation with myself as I decide which one is the most appropriate to act on. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if children simply ascribe these dissenting voices to actual characters. It may even seem strange to them that we as adults don’t manage our various thoughts and desires in the same manner.
Children also may not understand the distinction we make and the value we place on real as opposed to imaginary things and actions. We have had years to come around to the idea that only our interactions in the real world can actually change our position in it, but this may not be so easily understood by children. Imaginary friends may provide as much support and much needed interaction as real friends and family do. It may be why they so readily they admit that their friends are only in their heads and that they made them up. It seems strange to us since we’ve come to the conclusion that we have better things to invest our energy in, but they may not see what the big deal is.

Children's memory

2007-11-16T12:19:00.000-08:00

This week we read about memory, and how it develops. I think that this information was the most interesting to me, because there were several examples of children remembering things which had never occurred. I had heard about this happening with adults (particularly with Elizabeth Loftus’s work), but didn’t realize how dangerous the concept is until I was presented with how damaging it could be to children. Children that are exposed to crimes (either as a victim or a witness) are already in a vulnerable position, due to their inexperience with dealing with the information they have been exposed to. Combining that with their impressionability creates a situation even worse than that experienced by adults that witness or are the victims of crime.

The scariest part to me is that there are situations that I think I remember, but now I can’t be so sure about. There’s one specific instance in which I remember sitting in the passenger seat of a car, being driven to a Child Development Center and hanging out with a bunch of other kids, but also having access to watching my mother play tennis. (She was down on a lower level in a gymnasium, while I was on an upper level with a balcony overlooking the gym.) None of this happened. I know that it couldn’t have because I asked my mother about it later on in life. But it’s very clear in my mind still. I just wish I knew where I’d gotten the idea from. On a further note, I believe I’m very lucky not to have ever been exposed to something that could have been damaging to me, either being pressured into falsely accusing someone of misbehavior or having been mistreated and having someone try to talk me out of that idea.

It shocks and amazes me that we’ve been going off testimony that has basically been tampered with for years, without ever realizing that the words these children were saying were not actually their own. The worst part of it is that I don’t think anyone in particular is always at fault for it. The adults that were asking the children leading questions probably didn’t always realize that they were pushing the child to say things that weren’t true. However, I also realize that there are instances where someone does push a child to say something that they know isn’t true (i.e. the example from page 227 in the text). Nor can any blame be placed on the children in these dreadful situations, because it’s not their faults that their memories are easily manipulated. And because they don’t understand a lot of social situations, they just try to please the people they are talking to.

However, part of me wonders how much things like IQ and general memory effectiveness come into play in these situations. I guess I could be considered to have a pretty high IQ, but I have a terrible memory. I have absolutely no capacity to remember dates and times, and I don’t believe I ever have. The only time that I can specifically remember things was when I told myself to remember them. There was a time when I was a kid living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and two people were killed at the video store just down the street from my house. I remember that when I heard about it, I decided from then on to pay attention to the world around me, in case I ever witnessed a crime, so that I would be able to report it and help put the bad guys in prison. The thing that I realized after trying to do that all the time is that there’s a lot going on in the world, both in reality and in my mind. As a child with a lot of mental processing going on, it’s hard to pay attention to things that could be happening, in addition to things that are relevant in your life.

I suppose this relates back to thinking about children being used for eyewitness testimony. I just wonder if the prosecutors have ever realized how hard it must be for children to sort through everything in their minds. Not only is there so much going on (they’re still learning how to be people, for one thing) but they don’t have the practice that adults have with using the information we contain.

Susie's Imaginary Friend vs. Tommy's Imagined Persona

2007-11-16T12:17:00.000-08:00

The idea that gender may play a role in the types of imaginary play, poses an interesting question regarding why this may be the case. Although there isn't an overwhelming sense of consistency regarding the differences in boys and girls role play preferences, according to Alison Shawber there is a degree of difference in that girls tend to imagine an imaginary companion or companions, where as boys more often tend to have pretend identities. There may be several reasons for this difference including a possible need girls feel to nurture, the differences in how boys and girls are spoken to by their parents, or even the fact that at about the same age children are inventing or embodying these characters is at approximately the same time children begin to acknowledge more concretely the types of roles boys/men and girls/women preform which may encourage more quiet make-believe play from girls and louder, rougher play from boys, or the fact that boys may want to emulate a strong individual.
Although people may believe "girls have an innate need to nurture" that is in fact not entirely the case. Young girls are instead bombarded by images of nurturing, endlessly caring, and attentive women who form the mental picture of what it is to be a woman and because of this I find it very difficult to believe that girls are more likely to have imaginary companions than boys.
One difference that has been seen in children and their interactions with their parents is the different styles of communication that parents utilize when speaking to their children. Mothers tend to speak more frequently and with more elaboration when speaking to their daughters which could help to cultivate the level of imagination required to invent another entire individual; where as mothers tend to be more direct and concise with their sons which could require them to rely on outside stimulation, such as cartoons, to help them create their role play characters.
This is also the time in children's lives that they begin to more completely grasp that in frequent situations the expectations of them differ greatly. This difference is most often seen in the fact that girls are expected to "act like a lady" or "not get dirty" where as boys are told "go outside and play" and are less frequently punished for getting dirty or being overly loud. This may be one of the causes of role play differences because boys tend to embody loud and active pretend identities and girls may not be given the freedom to embody such boisterous characters.
Another possible explanation for this difference in tendency is that boys may be groomed to want to emulate a strong individual, I personally think that this is the most likely explanation for any difference that can be found within the imaginary play preferences in girls and boys. Due to the fact that our society constantly tells men of all ages that in order to thrive they must be strong and independent it seems only necessary that to achieve this mentality as young men and adults we must begin teaching boys these subtle mental pictures early. In looking at the examples given in the lecture of Spiderman and Batman we observe two superheros who are strong, secretive, brave, unemotional, and very autonomous, characteristics which we find valuable and societaly superior.
I am by no means attempting to say that these circumstances are universal or the causes of these differences I just think that these are factors which could influence the difference and should possibly more carefully looked at. Although, as I previously mentioned, there is not statistically significant evidence that these differences are overly prevalent among young children it seems that as our society continues to progress and these stereotypes of men and women become more ingrained these differences may continue to become more visible and more statistically predictable when examining role play behavior in children.

Non-parent college students' attitudes toward imaginary companions

2007-11-16T11:40:00.000-08:00

Parental support is defined as a key factor in the development of imagination, including the maintenance of imaginary companions (Singer & Singer, 1990; Taylor, 1999). Despite the fact that many parents have positive attitudes toward imaginary companions and support the interaction of their children with imaginary companions, such positive attitudes are not adopted by all parents (Taylor, 1999). Even though there are some children who create imaginary companions in spite of the negative attitudes of their parents, parental disapproval is considered one of the reasons why children abandon their imaginary companions after preschool (Taylor, 1999). Given the importance of the positive or negative contributions of parents in terms of both creating and sustaining an imaginary companion, it is not surprising that parental attitudes toward imaginary companions have been studied by various researchers (Gleason, 2004; Mauro, 1991; Taylor, 1999). However, research in this area is still very limited, and non-parent populations are usually not examined.

Last summer, I conducted a research project to study the attitudes of non-parent college students toward imaginary companions Based on the relatively more negative attitudes of parents toward older children’s developing or maintaining imaginary companions (Taylor, 1999), it was hypothesized that non-parent college students would have more negative attitudes toward older children than younger children with respect to the child’s interaction with imaginary companions. It was also hypothesized that in parallel with the findings that mothers are more likely than fathers to adopt positive attitudes toward their children’s imaginary companions (Gleason, 2005; Mauro, 1991), female college students would show more positive attitudes toward imaginary companions than their male counterparts. Finally, as the positive or negative attitudes of parents do not differ according to the gender of the child (Gleason, 2005), it was hypothesized that gender of the child would not yield differences in the attitudes of non-parent college students.

73 non-parent college students (38 females and 35 males) participated in the study. Materials used in the study consisted of two different versions of a survey. In both versions, the section on the attitudes toward a child’s interaction with an imaginary friend consisted of two vignettes. In the first vignette, participants were asked to read a short description of a 5-year-old child interacting with an imaginary friend and rate on a 7-item Likert scale (a) how concerned they would be; (b) how harmful having an imaginary friend would be for the child; (c) how beneficial having an imaginary friend would be for the child (d) whether they would think having an imaginary friend implies that the child has emotional problems. In order to assess whether children’s age has an effect on individuals’ attitudes, in the second vignette, participants were asked to read a short description of a 10-year-old child interacting with an imaginary friend. The two versions of the survey were identical except the child’s gender.

The study supported the hypothesis that non-parent college students have more negative attitudes toward older children than younger children with respect to the child’s interaction with imaginary companions. As expected, gender of the child did not yield differences in the attitudes of non-parent college students. Contrary to expectations, female participants did not have more positive attitudes toward children with imaginary companions than male participants. This finding may indicate that such attitudinal differences between females and males occur as a result of transition to traditional gender roles.

Despite its limitations, my study emphasized two future directions for research. First, the relatively negative attitudes of non-parent college students toward older children’s interactions with imaginary companions are worthy of further study. If further research confirms similar negative attitudes toward older children, such findings may be employed in explaining the factors that contribute to the reasons why older children abandon their imaginary companions. Second, a more comprehensive study of the similarities and differences between non-parent college students and parents would be useful in that it would reveal to what extent college students can be used as a sample when studying parental attitudes in particular and adult attitudes in general.

Role Play

2007-11-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

Pretend play was broken down into two subgroups: object substitution and role play. Role play was the focus of most of the lecture and subsequently is what I will be discussing. A large part of role play is the concept of an imaginary companion. It is often shown in television and movies that children with imaginary companions are the shy withdrawn individuals, while adults with imaginary companions are “crazy.” This portrayal in the media was shown to be wrong. Children with imaginary companions and role play in general tend to have higher verbal ability, creativity, extroversion, and executive functioning. Which of course, these findings make perfect sense; one would have to be quite creative to think up and imaginary friend and communicate with it. It is difficult for me to understand how role playing, particularly having an imaginary companion correlate to being more of an extrovert. It seems like this finding would be opposite. Playing with an imaginary friend or using role play all the time would appear to segregate you from other children, because you would be off in your own world.

During this lecture the question was raised as to whether or not children understood that their imaginary friends were not real, and that children could distinguish reality from fantasy. In lecture the conclusion was made, that yes, children do understand that role play, and their imaginary companions aren’t real. However, when testing this, it seemed like researchers depended on what the children said, whether or not they mentioned that it was all just pretend. They also relied on parent surveys. My thoughts are, that is if a child had an imaginary friend, the parent would constantly acknowledge the fact that they aren’t real, causing the child to start saying it as well. So, if a parent or an adult were to ask the child if their imaginary friend were real they would respond with the answer they were taught and told repeatedly, whether or not they believed it to be true. It seems that saying that their imaginary friend was real would produce a negative response from adults and their parents, so the say the answer that they know will get them a positive response. Children think that the characters they see on television are real, so it’s difficult for me to see how they would not think their own imaginary friends are real. I learned in my learning and memory class that the more a person thinks about an event, the more they can start to think it actually happened. Could the same be true for the concept of imaginary companions? The more a child thinks and interacts with their friend wouldn’t the lines between fantasy and reality become blurred?

Remembering That I Didn't Remember and a Little bit O' Imagination

2007-11-16T06:24:00.000-08:00

This post is going to be a quick touch on two topics, the first being memory that has possibly been implanted then moving to an actual episodic memory that involves imagination. OK, so picture this, there is a blond slender 2-3 year old boy being carried by a woman with black permed out hair. The child is thrashing about and just looks completely freaked out screaming, "Help, Help, she's not my mommy!!!" The woman comely trys to leave the store to elevate the other shoppers of the crying kid.

I remember this event because I was the kid screaming. Well, I kind of remember this. OK, I remember the first time I heard this story about one of my experiences at Nordstrom's growing up. This story struck me as funny during our lecture on memory because I have no real recollection of the event, but have heard the story so many times that I can visually see things from the child's point of view. I can just picture the look on my mom's face as she takes me out of the store, I can smell the perfume that she would have been wearing at the time, etc...

Just like you said in class, after being told a story over and over you start to remember it. I don't doubt that this event happened or not, it seems like something I would have done (I'm actually kind of proud that I could string together such a meaning phrase at that age). It's just funny that I have such a vivid picture of the event. What really gets me are the questions that I ask myself when I think about it. Like when I described myself as a slender 2-3 year old. This part of the story just kind of happened a couple of years ago. No one told me that I was slender at the time I just kind of added it to the story. My question is, could the story be taking on a life of it's own, the addition of the perfume smell, and my mom's facial expression are examples of this, or is it possible that I have old memories creeping back to the surface when I remember/think about the event.

Well, part two of this blog starts out with my rabid love for the X-men comic book characters. Growing up I would spend summers with my cousins, either here in Oregon, Detroit Michigan, or Baton Rogue Louisiana. No matter where we were we "played" X-men. Each of us had a favorite character and would take on that persona (self as vehicle). I don't remember exactly how old I was at the time, but I'm thinking around 10 or so. Anyways we were at a River Rhythm's concert up in Albany.

Running jumping all over the place I ran smack into a classmate of mine. As I talked to her one of my cousins jumped from the bushes and said, "Lets go Gambit, I think Wolverine is in trouble", then he jumped back into the bushes and let out an agonizing scream like he was just attacked by something.

I remember Katie, just kind of looking at me and back to my cousin like we were frikin crazy. I can feel my embarrassed red face, hear the music, and smell the stands selling all sorts of foods. I can pick apart details just like I can when I think of the above mentioned story that has been implanted by others into my head. When I think of each event they both come up as a true memory. Yet I know for a fact that only the second is, because I remember the first time I heard the story of my calls for help.

What is it about our memories that make it impossible to tell what was real and what wasn't. I have such vivid images of both events I can see and smell, yet I question one of them. Kind of crazy how memories work for us.

The Rules We Follow

2007-11-16T03:57:00.000-08:00

Kids take a long time to learn what is ok and not ok to do. Thinking about it, there are a lot of social rules that have to be learned. There’s what you’re supposed to say in different situations, do around different people, or how to be. Some of the rules are for children’s safety, such as don’t play in the street and don’t eat food off the floor, while others are to fit into general society, like don’t sit down next to someone on an empty bus and don’t swear in public.

An old roommate I had had a daughter who lived in the house with us. At the time my friends and I rented the house, she had just had her third birthday. My time living with her taught me a lot about dealing with little kids. She was a really rough-and-tumble little girl who like playing out in the backyard and bouncing around the living room, and she also had a real fondness for skirts. A social rule that she still hadn’t learned by the time I moved out a year later was that other people don’t want to see your underwear (at least, not any normal person, certainly no one in our house). She liked to lay on her back and kick her legs around, and all of us adults in the house told her every time that it wasn’t appropriate, but she really liked kicking her legs in the air. She certainly had no understanding of why this was not allowed, because she had no notion of what the adults around her thought of the situation, such as concerns of if a predator saw her doing this at the park. She just thought it was fun, while we were concerned for her safety out in the world.

Little kids don’t seem to have much concern for what adults place sexual meaning to. A lot of kids around two years old go through a naked phase. It isn’t to attract a mate, they have no idea about those things yet, it’s just another way to be. In other cultures without strong beliefs about the personal nature of one’s own nudity allow children to continue this, sometimes because it simply is not an issue, others because of basic economic and resource reasons. These children do not learn the same lesson of Western children to clothe themselves, but I’m sure that there are other lessons that they are taught that are not needed for urban, American children to adhere to.

It takes a long time to learn all the rules you need to follow to fit in normally. Just think about if you went to China, France, or Saudi Arabia. All the things that we think of as foreign are things that they have learned, and are all similar to the kinds of things that we leaned as children, in order to fit in and follow the rules.

I Think, Therefore I’m Alive?

2007-11-16T00:53:00.000-08:00

Our textbook says that for something to be viewed as a uniquely biological process, a process must be viewed as depending not on psychological mechanisms or physical mechanisms, but on specifically biological mechanisms. This distinction between psychological and biological processes makes sense, but it’s something that I had never really thought about before – I assumed that the two went hand in hand. I hadn’t noticed that I had been making this distinction subconsciously (almost?) all my life until we identified humans and animals, but not plants, as mentalistic agents in class. It fascinated me.

When I was thinking about this, I realized how so many children’s shows, stories and toys utilize the personification of inanimate objects. Very often this is done by giving these inanimate objects morphological features and having them react contingently, which, as we learned, children use to identify mentalistic agents. Do children think of these much-loved characters, such as Lofty and Muck from Bob the Builder, as living creatures because they appear to have psychological processes? Or do they, as essentialists, know that Lofty and Muck, as a crane and bulldozer respectively, are really mechanical objects and are therefore nonliving although they appear to be mentalistic agents? In other words, can they and do they make this distinction between psychological and biological processes?

Six-month-olds don’t seem to make this distinction – they expect goal-directed movement from humans but not from inanimate objects, suggesting that they associate psychological mechanisms with biological mechanisms. From experience, it appears to me that children around the preschool age are convinced that these personified inanimate characters are alive. This seems consistent with probabilistic representations – being a mentalistic agent is a high cue validity for the “living object” concept. There is a slight shift in their understanding here though: instead of something having to be alive to be a mentalistic agent, something that is a mentalistic agent has to be alive. Notice that although there is this shift, children still don’t seem to make the distinction between psychological and biological mechanisms.

How do they go from this to understanding that Thomas the Tank Engine isn’t a live object, or that plants are not mentalistic agents, even if they are alive? We know they get there eventually (because we as adults make the distinction), so the question is at what age do they learn to make this distinction, and how?

It seems most likely to me that this change occurs along the lines of the explanation of the conceptual development that I put forth in my last blog post – when children get to school and learn about the underlying biological mechanisms that make something “alive”, they would then have defining features for what is alive and what isn’t. They would learn how being alive is more than being able to think, and how appearing to be able to think does not necessarily make something alive. In the same way they would also learn that one of the defining features of the “plant” concept is “not being a mentalistic agent”. They would then be able to make the distinction between the psychological and biological processes.

I wasn’t able to find any research in this area, so this hypothesis that children don’t make the distinction between psychological and biological mechanisms isn’t empirically based, and I’m sure there are other explanations for it too. It would be interesting to conduct research to shed some light on how and when we learn to make this inconspicuous but important distinction.

Repressed Memory—True or False?

2007-11-15T20:55:00.000-08:00

Encoding, storing, and retrieving memories is undeniable a very complicated process. There are many opportunities for something to go wrong and memories to be lost, fused, or fabricated from outside sources. For this reason, many researchers have focused on false memories and the suggestibility of memory.

In class, the research conducted by Elizabeth Loftus was mentioned, but not much detail was given. I vaguely recalled some of the studies that I had read about and was curious enough to do some further research. I found few articles detailing specific studies that had been conducted; most of what I found were articles detailing very specific cases where “de-repressed” memories were used to convict a person for a crime. Elizabeth Loftus uses language that I would consider inflammatory and designed to persuade the reader that the idea of memory repression is a myth. Loftus in Remembering Dangerously [1995] claims “Like the witch-hunt trials of old, people today are being accused and even imprisoned on 'evidence' provided by memories from dreams and flashbacks -- memories that didn't exist before therapy.”

Although there is plenty of empirical evidence indicating that memory is highly susceptible to suggestion under particular circumstances there is no evidence that one cannot recover accurate memories long forgotten. I believe that children when faced with highly traumatic events may develop dissociative amnesia and memories of the events may be arrested in some portion of the memory to spare the child further trauma. These memories may or may not resurface at some point in time.

Elizabeth Loftus only seems to speak to cases where a therapist was involved in helping a patient to ‘recover’ repressed memories; there are other cases, less publicized, less bizarre, and certainly less controversial where someone has remembered without involvement of a therapist, the use of guided imagery, misleading questions or hypnosis.

It seems to me that there is great deal of research left to be done in this area, but Loftus leads us to believe that the jury is in and repressed memories simply cannot and do not exist. Although her research has provided us with some valid evidence regarding the suggestibility of the memory system, I believe that she does a great disservice to the victims of trauma who have recovered memories by negating their validity.

Infantile Amnesia

2007-11-15T20:44:00.000-08:00

Infantile Amnesia is a topic that I found really interesting in class. I had never actually thought about this topic before. Why is it that we can't remember our childhood experiences before a certain age? When this topic was brought up in class I remembered one of my first clear chilhood memories. I remember that I was living in Italy with my mom and grandma and I clearly remember that our neighbor had a huge fat gray cat named Corey. I use to love this cat, but since I was little I was always annoying the poor cat until one day, this is a really clear memory that I have, the cat scratched me but not just anywhere he scratched me right in the eye, from then on I remember being afraid of cats as a little girl. It is funny that out of all my memories in Italy this seems to be the one that I remember with more detail, perhaps because it had a big impact for me as a little girl, and probably because I went and told my grandma and mom about it. Since I was able to share what happened with my family as well as them talking about the event with me, maybe that is why I remember it so clearly. Also living in Italy was a happy moment in my life, perhaps we tend to remember happy memories more than sad memories.

There are many theories regarding infantile amnesia. One of them is the language explanation. Some argue that the incomplete development of language in young children may be the cause of childhood amnesia. Through the sharing of language we are able to form mental representation and can remember events better than when we don't talk about an event. In my case perhaps the sharing of the event helped me form a mental representation and also the emotional state that I was in got engraved differently in my memory and perhaps that is why I remember this much better than other things that happened when I was there.

I also have some memories that are even earlier but not so vivid, kind of like dream-like memories, I remember being in a bus with my grandma in Peru, I was about 3 or 4 and a lady was saying how cute I was and that I looked so much like my grandma. I remember crying so hard and later telling my grandma that the lady said I looked like an old lady. This memory is not very vividly but sometimes I wonder if I really do remember this memory or maybe it was planted by my grandma who would always remember the event and tell it to everyone since she found it funny. Perhaps some memories are real while others are implanted in our memories by our parents but whatever really is the cause I think that infantile amnesia is an interesting topic with many explanations that all seem accurate.
I think that a lot of the theories seem to have a lot of support for why we may not remember our first years of life but the ones that seem could be the cause are the language explanation theory as well as the physical development explanation in which it suggests that perhaps children's mind is not mentally mature enough to create long-lasting autobiographical memories, it is not until 3 that children develop brain areas such as prefrontal cortex which is associated with the formation of memories.

IC's

2007-11-15T19:39:00.000-08:00

Alicia Bradshaw asked in her blog if the 35% of children that don't have IC's engage in other pretend play. I did a little research to try to clarify what Alison Shawber tried to convey during lecture. Paul Harris, author of The Work of the Imagination, cited Majorie Taylor's 1998 finding that two-thirds of children have IC's, if you consider the vehicle for orchestration to be an imaginary character, or a projection onto an external prop. She also is cited by Harris for claiming that the number goes up to three-quarters if you include children who engage in impersonation. Children as young as 2 have the ability to understand pretense. Harris demonstrated this by pretending to "wash teddy" using a toy teddy, shoe box (bath tub), and a wood brick (soap) with a 2 y.o. infant. The child quickly made sense of the situation and began to "help" wash teddy, and when the teddy was raised out of the "bath" the child claimed "he's all wet!" and "dried" the teddy. This showed that the child has a pretty sophisticated understanding of pretence. According to Taylor, as cited by Harris, children will engage in role play, even if they are by themselves, by impersonation or evoking an IC. There is a suggestion though that children who don't have IC's, do engage in pretend play, and are capable of having an IC. When I think of why a child may not have an IC, I can think of many possible reasons. Some parents may mistake an IC for a psychosis, and prohibit the child from that type of play. There may be religious reasons for prohibiting imaginary play. In a lecture by Majorie Taylor, she reported that Mennonite children are not allowed to engage in pretend play, which was due to their belief that pretend play is a waste of time. This doesn't mean that they don't develop pretence though, otherwise they wouldn't learn their religion. Many figures in religion such as angels are described as having many human features, but supernatural ones as well. This requires an understanding and development of pretence. In summary all children engage in pretend play of one type or another, and even though some may not develop (or just not report)an IC, children are still capable of it.

Imaginary companions

2007-11-15T17:57:00.001-08:00

The topic I would like to discuss in this week’s blog deals with imaginary friends/companions. After reading some of the posts Sarah Ennis’ blog really got me thinking. She talks about what determines whether or not a child will have an imaginary companion. Sarah talks about similarities that children with ICs (imaginary companions) have. She then suggests some reasons why children may create these ICs. I would like to take the other side of this and suggest some reasons why children may not create ICs. The most obvious reason deals with the child’s development. Alison Shawber talked about how children with ICs have to be able to understand “pretense, which is a representational act which is dependent on a mental representation.” They must be able to understand this in order to understand other people’s pretend acts and to be able to pretend themselves. One reason why some children do not create ICs is because they do not have this ability yet. They may not be able to understand pretense and therefore they cannot understand “pretend acts.” However, this does not mean that they may not create one later on. This just may be a reason why some children create an IC later on in their childhood.
One other suggestion that I have for why some children do not create ICs deals with some gender differences. Alison Shawbert mentioned that there were some gender differences in this topic of imaginary companions. She said that girls are more likely to have imaginary companions. She also said that boys are more likely to have pretend identities. I would like to suggest that this may be due to the social construction of gender. Girls are taught to be caring, nurturing, and warm. I understand that not every IC is something that can be taken care of. But maybe one reason why girls are more likely to create an IC is because they are taught these things (caring, nurturing, etc). Maybe they feel the need to take care of something. A similar suggestion can be made of boys which may explain why some children do not create ICs. Maybe boys are more likely to create pretend identities because they are conditioned to be “a man,” and be the hero in situations. Boys might feel the need to show the fact that they can be a “hero” or the “strong man.” This may be a reason why boys do not create ICs as often as girls do.
The last thing that I would like to do in this post is ask a question. Alison Shawber told us that 65% of children have an IC. What I would like to know deals with the other 35% of children. If they do not create imaginary companions do they pretend in other ways? An imaginary companion falls into the category of “nothing as a vehicle” when talking about role play. Do these children role play with the self or a toy as the vehicle. Also do these children participate in object substitution? I would just like to know if there have been any studies on whether or not children without ICs participate in any other pretend play.

Contingent interaction vs. Egocentric Communication

2007-11-15T16:23:00.000-08:00

The topic of social cognition is very interesting to me and has made me become more aware and thankful of all the intricate yet simple knowledge that we develop. I have a better understanding of beliefs, thinking, knowing and pretending that makes me realize how lucky we are to have the cognitive/social abilities to reason about each topic. One particular concept that stood out to me was “contingent interaction” which starts at about 2 months of age. Contingent interaction is when a child starts to display reciprocal actions and reactions with other people. This means that children start to understand beyond their own wants and needs and also takes others into consideration. It just amazes me how infants can do this at a very young age. This idea challenges Piagetian Model, which claims that children in the Preoperational Period (2-7 Years) are still in the stage of egocentric communication. Egocentric communication is when a child communicates with another individual but doesn’t take the others perspective into consideration (its like having a one sided conversation). Piaget’s views claim that children aren’t able to take another individuals perspectives into account when conversing until they reach the Concrete operational stage (7-12 years). Some studies shown in class this Wednesday support the idea that children as young as 18 months old are able to recognize others desires. An example would be the test whether children handed broccoli or goldfish to an experimenter that expressed interest in the same item as they did (goldfish) or something that was different (broccoli). Younger children (14 months) would give the experimenter the goldfish because they assumed that because they themselves like the goldfish that the experimenter would too, and the older children (18 months) gave the experimenter what they wanted. This particular experiment also contradicts Piaget’s view of egocentric communication because it shows that children show contingent interaction way before Piaget’s Concrete Operational Period (7-12 years).
These findings show that children know the importance of paying attention to their social environment for better communication with others. Even before children can actually compose full sentences, evidence in class shows that they have an understanding of how to listen and better communicate with others. One example would be a child pretending to talk on the phone and having short breaks between babbling because they are imitating what a conversation sounds like. I was never blessed with younger siblings and find myself having a hard time interacting with infants and toddlers because I never know what they understand and don’t understand when it comes to conversing with them. I find myself in awkward situations when it comes to talking with toddlers and end up with them giving me funny looks because I tend to talk to them as if they were five years younger than they actually are. This class and the studies presented in them have taught me a lot about children’s social cognition and gives me a better understanding of what children of different ages comprehend.

Imaginary Companions in pretend play

2007-11-15T13:56:00.000-08:00

Sarah Ennis
Blog #4

One of my most favorite topics of this course is the phenomenon of pretend play. Pretend play provides researchers with information about a child’s ability to perform abstract mental representations and learn social skills. Because most children engage in pretend play one could deduce that it must serve an important purpose in a child’s social and cognitive development. Otherwise, some children would engage in pretend play and others would not. Alison discussed different forms of role play. Two of the types of role-play, object or no objects as vehicle, often take the form of an imaginary or invisible companion. Not all children report having imaginary friends or companions. Alison Shawber discussed a study from her lab which found that 65% of children had Imaginary Friend(s) (Taylor, et al., 2004). My question is what determines whether a child will have an imaginary or invisible companion? One place to begin searching for the answer to this question is by considering that which separates children with IC’s versus children who do not (a child who may only pretend play with other children and not create or play with an IC)? She discussed certain characteristics that children with IC’s often possess including enhanced verbal ability, sociability, creativity, and others. Based on these enhanced abilities of children with IC’s and the fact that most children engage in some form of pretend play lead me to reason that the existence of an IC could be a child’s unconscious desire for additional social interaction perhaps to gain or sharpen certain social or mental skills. Children may not always have access to other children to play with, which may force create an imaginary friend or companion in order to fulfill this desire. Furthermore, a child may create an IC in the absence of actual children because they prefer ceratin characteristics of an IC versus an actual child. For instance, with an IC a child can control what elements of pretend play they explore as well as the behaviors or actions of the IC. This allows more flexibility, exposure to more creative play and possible more fun for the child. Interestingly, what type of play a child engages in is individual to each child. Although the answers to why pretend play exists may not be so explicit, implicitly it may serve an extremely important role in social and cognitive development.

Elizabeth Loftus

2007-11-15T12:55:00.000-08:00

We talked briefly on Wednesday November, 7th about the work of Elizabeth Loftus concerning the suggestibility of memory. Loftus has created quite a name for herself in this area of study, and a lot of controversy as well. I know that one study that Loftus conducted involves showing participants a photo that includes a stop sign, and then asking about the yield sign, which often prompts people to remember that there was a yield sign, in the picture, rather than a stop sign. One problem with this is they are not given the opportunity to say that there was not a yield sign, so this implantation might not really be there. Some other studies have suggested that, that image of a stop sign remains in memory. She has also done work by prompting memories through the description of an event, such as showing participants a video of a car crash, than asking half of them how fast they thought the car was going when the cars “smashed” into each other and the other half are asked how fast the cars were going when they “bumped” into each other. Later participants are asked if there was glass at the scene of the accident, and more of the people from the “smashed” group report remembering glass. At the very end of class a person brought up controversy surrounding Loftus’ work, specifically commenting on the fact that Loftus has some conflicting ideas with one of the professors here at UofO. I assume she was referring to Jennifer Freyd, who does a lot of research on betrayal trauma theory, a theory Loftus has takes issue. I have not ever met Jennifer, but I work with one of her grad students in her lab and I am conducting experiments on betrayal trauma theory in that lab. Where Loftus and Freyd disagree is on recovered memories, and their validity. Loftus argues that because of this suggestibility that recovered memories are not valid memories. That people might believe that they are real, but they were lead to this through their memories suggestibility. There is a lot of compelling arguments that indicate that memory if fallible, I am not taking issue with that. In fact, I have seen the documentary we are watching next Wednesday and that is a really good example of just that. That these kids were coached by authorities with preconceived ideas about what had happened to them, and that may have created these memories in the minds of the computer students. Though there is also some very compelling evidence that, at least the father was an open pedophile. The best part of the film, in my opinion, is that is doesn’t seek an answer necessarily, rather it just tells the freedman’s story. I am not sure her stance, but I doubt that Freyd would argue that memory can’t be tainted and is suggestible, she would argue, however, that recovered memories, especially of traumatic events, are a reality and it is detrimental to trauma victims when people, like Loftus, try to discredit their real memories. Freyd’s theory suggests that there is a spectrum of trauma; reaching from fear (car crashes, natural disasters) to betrayal (sexual molestation perpetrated by a family member) and that people who experience betrayal trauma are more likely to dissociate and forget the event, as a survival technique. Because, if your parent abuses you as a defenseless child, you still need them to provide you with other things, thus it is advantageous to forget the trauma. So, while it is a common argument that more emotionally charged situations tend to be remembered in greater detail, because of the emotional state of encoding, this hypothesis proposes an adaptive reason for forgetting, and than later recovering memories, memories that are real. This is a gross oversimplification, but I think a really important debate that is heated in the psychology world, and on our campus. To me a lot of what Loftus is doing is really dangerous. One study that supports Freyd’s position involved researchers finding medical records of children who were brought into the hospital for sexual abuse, they than went out and found these children as adults, and asked them questions about their history, and about abuse, a large percentage of them had no memory of their abuse, and I believe some also reported at least some period of not remembering their abuse. A lot more can be said about this debate, I just think it is important to note that Loftus is a potentially dangerous figure is psychology and that, while she has some interesting and important results concerning suggestibility, we need to be very careful and sensitive when we look at memories of trauma, because it would be terrible to further traumatize victims through disbelief. But admittedly convicting innocent people of sexual abuse is also very traumatic.

Pretend Identities

2007-11-15T11:32:00.000-08:00

Imagination begins at a very young age. Children learn the concept of "real" or "pretend" play and become able to distinguish the difference around the age of one year. Pretend play can take on three different forms; self as a vehicle, toy as vehicle, and nothing as a vehicle. The self as a vehicle is a type of play where the child takes on a pretend identity such as acting like superwoman, batman, or even a business man. Toy as a vehilce can be where the child gives personality to a toy such as a talking stuft animal, or it can be where the child uses objects in a way that is beyond there normal function. An example of this would be a block used to represent an airplane that flies around the room. The last type of pretend play covered in lecture was nothing as a vehicle. Such situations usually involve the child having an imaginary firend they play with and develop an entire persona for.
The type of pretend play that I was most intrigued by was the self as a vehicle. Starting from the age of one for about a year, I believed I was a cat. I refused to speak to anyone and would simply meow and run around in a Halloween costume that consisted of a black tail sowed to the black sweatshirt and cat ears. This is a typical pretend identity where the child imagines that she takes on characteristics of another being while wearing a speical costume, etc. My younger brother on the other hand, had a different form of pretend identity and decided at the age of four that he wanted to grow up to be a "big, huge, bald, black man." Such an identity formed from his love of basketball and he would sit in the driveway for hours pretending to dunk on his mini hoop set. His identity has a different spin that most pretend identities because he was awaiting the day when he could grow up and become his identity. His image displays a barrier to learning we discussed earlier in class in that he had not yet realized that race does not change as we grow up. One cannot decide to alter one's race as you could pick a new career.
My brother's alternate idea of identity causes me to wonder if pretend identities are something we engage in throughout our lives. As a young child, I had a strong love of animals and my pretending to be one may have been my desire to actually become one. My brother had a better concpet of reality but still a naive one. He knew that when you grow up you get to "be" something different than you are now and he assumed that encompassed everything. Adults still engage in this practice. If you were to ask college students what they are going to do when they graduate, each would have some sort of image in their head whether that image is to go to law school or to go back to living with their parents. It would be hard for many people to pursue a degree without having some image of what life may be like in the future. Our imagination gives us direction in life and helps us to plan out our path.
I think it would be very informative to run an imagination lab that tracked children's motivations for forming pretend indetities. It could possibly ask them why they chose such an identity and if they believe they can become that identity when they grow up. Does children's ability to engage in pretend play coincide or even for-tell the formation of a concept of the future? Do time and imagination go hand in hand?

Suggestibility

2007-11-14T22:11:00.000-08:00

It is interesting to think back to my earliest memory. It was the month of May 1988 and my mom had gone into labor and was about to deliver my first sibling. My mom didn’t want to know the sex of the baby so it was a mystery about whether I was going to have a new baby brother or sister. The only solid memory that I have about this day was sitting in the lobby of the hospital when my dad informed me that I now had a new baby brother. I was furious. I remember having a profound sense of disappointment to learn that my new sibling wasn’t a girl. This event occurred when I was three years old, the time in which most people form their first memories.
After learning about infantile amnesia and the development of memory, I am beginning to question whether or not I actually do remember this event and many other events that occurred in my life when I was a small child. For instance, for a while I had the idea that the earliest memory I had was as an infant. I have this image ingrained in my head of lying on my back in a stroller and looking up at the trees as my mom pushed me down the sidewalk. I also have a memory of being led out of a store by a strange man who I, since I did not look at him, thought was my dad. Although these memories are not of great significance, thinking about them and the possibility that I made them up, led me to think about the power of suggestion and how it can even lead to the formation of false memories.
It seems to be quite common for parents to repeatedly tell their children stories about something they did during their childhood. This repetition sometimes causes the child to “remember” a particular event and, therefore, create a memory of that event. In other words, memories are sometimes constructed based entirely on the suggestions of other people such as parents. For example, it may be true that as a little girl, my mom told me time and time again about how she used to push me in my stroller down a sidewalk lined with huge trees. She may have told me this so many times that I eventually started to “remember” and ultimately formed a “memory” of the event. In the case of the stranger, I might have imagined at the time that the strange man was trying to kidnap me, although he probably wasn’t, and because of this thought, I might have formed a false memory that I was almost kidnapped.
Although these things might have happened, it is likely that I actually do not have actual memories of these events. My false memories did not have any serious implications, but the tendency of children to be more suggestible than adults can have legal implications. It is possible that in the case of the stranger, I could have been talked into believing that he was actually trying to kidnap me and I could have gotten him into serious trouble. In any case, it is extremely important to understand that children are highly suggestible and that this tendency can be dangerous.

Protecting the Innocent

2007-11-14T21:46:00.000-08:00

Studies we looked at in class show that children are highly suggestible when influenced through leading questions, repeated interviews, etc. Other studies show adults can also be very suggestible; subjects who watched a video of a car accident "remembered" details that didn't exist significantly more often when asked leading questions. This effect is much more pronounced in children, however, and this can lead to many challenges in legal situations where children are witness to or victim of a crime.

I learned a bit more about this topic over the summer while taking the course "Psychology and the Legal System." While there are all kinds of pitfalls in crime investigation, one of the most sensitive subjects deals with children in sexual abuse cases. With such grave accusations, it is important to get accurate information from children. As discussed in class, this requires a patient interviewer asking open-ended questions as early as possible in the investigation. Fortunately, there is an amazing organization in Eugene called the Child Advocacy Center, where they lessen the trauma, time, and shuffling around involved in such investigations. They also do interviews with children which can later be entered as evidence in a trial. In class, we had the opportunity to watch a video of such an interview; the child's identity was protected through blurring. The interviewer first took great care to introduce himself and explain everything that was going to happen, establishing a sense of openness to gain the child's trust. He then proceeded to ask questions of the child about what had happened in very general terms, he often didn't even use specific words until the child said them first, in order to structure the interview around her vocabulary instead of his. He let her describe the house she lived in, only talking about locations after she mentioned them. In this case, the child very clearly described situations in which her father had abused her, but the interviewer continued to speak in a friendly and professional manner, preventing the situation from being scary or shameful. The interviewer, who was our guest speaker for the day, said that his job is not always that straight-forward, though. On one occasion, he had a mother who brought her son in, positive he was being abused by another family member, but an interview with the child gave strong evidence that he was not being abused. One wonders, though, are there some children who are convinced by a suspicious parent that they have been abused? It sounds like the video next Thursday may shed light on this question.

This all comes back to the very important responsibility we have as adults to give children a voice, free of someone else's bias, if we would hear what they have to say. Fortunately there are resources like the Child Advocacy Center that understand how to best listen to and help children in those situations.

Early Language Acquisition and Cognition-General

2007-11-08T15:42:00.000-08:00

This class is about “Developmental Cognition.” How does this relate to other classes offered at the University of Oregon? In a similar field of study, “Cognition” taught by Dr. Ulrich Meyer, a structural diagram of cognition-general was given (figure 1). General cognition was presented as the process by which (a) incoming stimulus is, (b) slightly analyzed and is then (c) passed on to the short-term or working memory. The short-term/working memory is where general cognition takes place. Herein lays the foundation for (d) conscious cognition and thought and the focus or maintenance loop. From here the mind has access to (e) the long-term memory and the subconscious/semantics.

Figure 1
Cognition-General

Incoming Stimulus
i
Some
Early Analysis
i
Short Term Memory

Conscious CognitionThought
(Maintenance Loop/ Focus)
o
(Access)
o
Long Term Memory
(subconscious-semantics)

How does this relate to our class as related to developmental cognition? In the instance of, or domain of, “Early Language Acquisition,” eight month old learners experience independent mechanisms, like the segmentation of words from fluent speech. This is represented in this cognitive structural diagram (figure 2).

Figure 2
Experience Independent Mechanisms

Environmental Stimulus
Bunches of Words/Sounds
i
early analysis/interpretation
i
Short Term Memory

Conscious Cognition
Ego trying to Define and Speak
(Induction Dilemma)
Segmentation of Words from
Fluent Speech
(Maintenance Loop/Focus)
o
(Access)
o
Long Term Memory
Subconscious:
-semantics
-definitions

This is a representation of powerful mechanisms for the computation of statistical properties of language input.

essentialism

2007-11-02T16:54:00.001-07:00

Gelman’s research has demonstrated that young children possess an essentialist view and even some adults use this same concept. As stated in the lecture slides, Gelman defines essentialism as an “assumption that categories of things in the world have a true, underlying nature or ‘essence’ that causes things to be in particular categories, gives them their identity”. Gelman uses three concepts to provide evidence of essentialism. The first concept is inductive potential. Inductive potential is the ability to group a new member of a category into the preexisting category based on similar traits. The second concept that Gelman uses is innate dispositions. This concept states that nature will not be affected by nurture. The third concept is maintenance of identity. This idea comes from the fact that you can dress something up, but it will remain the same. Gelman believes that children can be born with an essentialist point of view.

Children will use the essentialist view as part of their learning process. Gelman believes that essentialism is an innate part of life that you are born with. Once you start to understand what essentialism is, it is easy to see where she comes up with this idea. Gelman did research on young children to see if they understood what essentialism was. Gelman found that children as young as four understood what inductive potential were. Children understand that “an object will be more similar to members of the same category, even if it looks more similar to members of another category.” To test if children understood the concept of innate disposition, Gelman presented the idea that an animal was raised with another class of animals to children. Gelman than asked the children characterized traits questions about the raised animal. Children understood that nature would beat nurture. The third concept was used to see if children understand that you can dress an object up, but will it remain the same. Keil found that second grade students understood this concept for animal, but not for artifacts. These concepts are basic ideas and it is understandable why children are able to grasp them. As children mature, the concepts do not get abandoned and new concepts are formed.

This week in class I found the concept of essentialism very interesting. It was interesting to me because I could understand how it was related in everyday life. The concepts seem easy enough that a child could easily use it as part of their learning. An example of this would be the concept of Halloween. During the fun of dressing up for Halloween, a child still knows that there is a person behind the costume. Not only do children use essentialism, but adults will use it too. An example would be that if I’m meeting a friend of a friend, I’m assuming that the friends share similar character traits. Another example would be that if I’m seeing something for the first time than I will use underlying categories to define the new item. I agree with Gelman’s idea that essentialism is an innate concept.

2007-11-02T16:48:00.001-07:00

I found the way that children develop the concept of time to be extremely interesting while we were discussing it in class. We talked about how time includes both experiential and logical aspects. Experienced time is how long we think a particular event takes place, while logical time is produced through reasoning.
In our book it discusses experiential time and how even children as young as four months old can discriminate between two movies being run forward and backwards showing a liquid being poured into a glass. This shows that these young infants have knowledge of how our world operates and that in order for one thing to occur there is a specific process that must also occur in along with a specific time in which that process happens. “Thus, understanding of temporal order seems well established in the first year of life” (Siegler and Alibali, pg. 284). This knowledge is very important in understanding how and why our world works the way that it does.
Logical time is often harder to develop and there are people ranging in all ages including adults that still do not have this concept fully developed. Our book also talks about the single object/single motion intuition is the belief that all parts of the same object will move at the same speed when it is in motion. This is hard to explain but the race car example works well, where a race car travelling around a race track has two doors on it that are moving at different speeds, the one on the outside is moving much faster. This idea is much better realized when it is acted out in real life with examples such as two people holding on to a pole and walking in a circle, where the outside person must walk a lot faster to keep up with the inside person. Without this demonstration or other knowledge of physics logical time is a much more complex concept to fully understand.
The knowledge and understanding of time in our society is crucial. We differ in our society in that we are extremely time oriented and always must stick to a strict schedule, where other societies for instance in Mexico this time obsession is much different, they rely more on personal interactions rather than set chronological time. The development or this concept of time is therefore very important for infants to understand in our society.

Development of a category of gender

2007-11-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

Psychological essentialism is a mode of category representation in which membership of a category requires an underlying and unchanging reality, in other words, an essence (Gelman et al. 1994; Prentice and Miller, 2007). Recent studies with adult participants show that categories that can be observed by relatively stable physical qualities, such as categories of race, ethnicity, and physical disability are more strongly essentialized than categories associated with social class, appearance, or interests (Haslam et al., 2000). According to Haslam et al. (2000), among all the categories that are used to categorize people, including age, race, and intelligence, the categorical domain that is the highest in essentialism is gender. Although gender may be the most essentialized category compared to other categories, research suggests that the categorization of gender follows a reverse U-shaped developmental path, changing from a not essentialist to highly essentialist understanding, and then going back to a less essentialist understanding.

At the beginning of the development of a category of gender, there does not appear to be an essentialist view. Children between the ages of 2 and 3 believe that a person’s sex can change by changing external features such as clothing and hairstyle (Siegler & Alibali, 2005). They do not see sex as a permanent feature and believe that one can change their sex if they want to change it. Even though this pattern of categorization does not imply anything about whether young children perceive gender as a social or biological category, it implies that young children do not see gender as a category determined by essence.

Gender as a category of essence seems to appear by the age of 4, when children start to attribute gender differences to underlying and unchanging biological sex differences. A study by Taylor (1996) demonstrates this tendency toward essentialism and how it changes with age. In this study, 4 to 10 year-old children and adults were presented a story in which a baby was raised on an island with only members of the opposite sex (e.g. a girl raised by men) or with only members of the same sex (e.g. a girl raised by women). Then, they were asked what properties that character would have at age 10. At all ages, participants in the same-sex island condition said the character would acquire same-sex properties. However, in the opposite-sex condition, children up to age 10 based their responses significantly more on gender category rather than the effects of the environment. For example, they said a baby girl would acquire feminine properties even though she was raised by men. In contrast, 10-year-old children and adults responded that a baby girl would acquire more masculine properties when raised by men. This study suggests that on average, children up to 10-years-old see gender as a category of essence, and after 10-years-old, gender is perceived more as a social category that can be influenced by environment.

In a world where adults do not have a consensus on how much of gender as a category can be attributed to social factors or biological qualities, it is surprising to see the consensus among children about seeing gender as an essential category up to a certain age. Research on the domain-specifity of categorization processes of children may shed light to both why children follow such a U-shaped development and why the end of this U-shape only reaches to the point which makes gender the category domain that is the highest in essentialism among adults.

Children are innate essentialists??

2007-11-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

In the class, I wondered how we know that a whale actually is not fish. I also wondered when we start understanding that plants also have lives like we do. It seems that we just know everything about this world naturally after we grew up. Recent studies have suggested that we learn to categorize by judging essential requirements for each categories. In addition, the study by Gelman and her colleagues (1994) suggested that children already have innate assumptions of the world. In other words, children already have ability to make judgments on essential conditions. In order to test their hypothesis, Gelman and her colleagues (1994) ruled out several explanations that children develop the knowledge of the world by reviewing other studies. Specifically, they ruled out the explanation such that children’s judgments do not rely on perceptual similarity, their past experiences and teaching from their parents. Nevertheless, children’s past experiences, their perceptual development and their parents help children to become essentialist.

First of all, it is impossible that children would do well on categorizing without their perceptual observation. For instance, to understand the concept of living and non-living, children need to observe the differences and the similarities between living objects and non-living objects. The more detailed they observe between living objects and non-living objects, the more concrete concepts of living and non-living they have developed. Specifically, they might notice all living subject would move, and then they observed that all living objects would grow and die. Thus, it is possible that children construct the essential conditions for each categories based on their perceptual development.

Second, the past experience plays an important role on helping children to revise their existed categories. Take the study of gender-role properties as an example. Children in young age were confused of the gender of a male Barbie if it were dressed in a skirt. However, children in older age, they knew what is essential to determine genders and were not confused the gender role by outside appearance . Related to children’s perceptual development, children in young age only noticed the outside appearance. But, how do children start to notice what is essential to observe? Apparently, children might know the essential differences between genders through their past experiences. For example, they might notice the difference between body structures of genders when they take bath with their siblings or their parents. So, their past experience might give them chance to observe the salient difference among categories.

Third, although parents do not explicitly teach their children an essentialist philosophy, parents might influence children’s reasoning. Children might have more past experiences than others if their parents encourage them to discover this world. For example, preschool children with helicopter parents might be prevented from observing animals, insects or plants closely because their parents are overprotecting. They worry that their children might get germs or get hurt from playing with animals, insects or plants. Thus, preschool children with helicopter parents might not have enough experiences and observations to construct their theory of the world than other preschool children with normal parents. In addition, the children with responsive parents might have more knowledge of world and human than children with non-responsive parents. For instance, responsive parents give corrective information to their children repeatedly and rapidly when their children think that a caterpillar is a still caterpillar after it grows up. On the other hand, non-responsive parents might ignore the errors that children made and the questions that children asked. Presumably, children with responsive parents might have more knowledge of the world and human because responsive parents encourage them to seek new knowledge and revise the incorrect concepts of the world and human that children made.

In conclusion, although the study by Gelman (1994) provided the evidence that preschool children are innate essentialists, children still need their past experience, their perception and the knowledge from their parents to build up the assumptions of the world. For example, it is doubtful that a child would know that there is blood inside of his or her body if he or she never experiences bleeding or sees others bleed. Therefore, it is possible that children’s innate knowledge of the world is not innate. Instead, children’s theory of the world and human is based on he combination of their perceptual observation, accumulation of past experiences and the knowledge from their parents.

The Importance of Education

2007-11-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

The one thing that I have continually noticed throughout the readings is the importance of educating children. And by educating, I don’t just mean formally, with books and classrooms. I also mean through life experiences. In many of the problem solving topics discussed in the reading, and even biological processes, children could not ever gain the knowledge that they need to be successful in life without experience with the outside world.

First of all, when discussing biological concepts, it is important to note that children do seem to have some innate knowledge of biological and non-biological movement, and that with some amount of time they also come to understand living and non-living objects, but without the experiences that they have had in life, they could not come to know either. The book even mentions a study done by Inagaki (1990) where they compared the understanding of children that had raised goldfish as pets to children that hadn’t raised goldfish. The children that had experience with a pet was better able to understand another kind of animal that they were less familiar with, simply because they had some personal concept of living things.

Also, in many of the problem solving tasks, there is importance put on feedback to and education of the children, and the effects of that on the children. It is important to note that children do have some basic understanding of problem solving, but it is also very interesting to see how they combine what they already know with what they are taught, in order to solve new problems. For example, in the balance-scale problems, it was indicated that even children that were expected to be able to solve such problems, having been taught them in a classroom environment, were unable to make the jump from the type of balance they had learned the problem on to the one used in the experiment. Therein lies a problem, in my opinion. It seems that if the educational system currently in use was actually beneficial to students, they would be able to generalize information that they have learned in classes like physics to real world situations, where the balance problem might not even be a balance, but could be a car teetering on the edge of a cliff. It seems like it would be important to be able to figure out a problem like this in a hurry.

As for mental models, I find it interesting that children have so many different mental models of the earth. In my opinion, this is reassuring, because it shows that children are capable of thinking for themselves. This is useful in many cases, as some teachers start with incorrect information (as before they knew what shape the earth really was) that may have to be corrected at some point in a child’s life. If a child were just blindly taking in information, they would not be able to go back and change old misinformation, and would potentially walk around confused about which information was correct. Sometimes, reading about this stuff makes me wonder what I did when I was the age of the children mentioned in these studies. Did I believe that the earth was round? Although it wasn’t mentioned in this book, I want to point out that there are still people that believe that the earth is flat, and that the photos that we have seen of Earth are not actually real. It seems like that would be difficult information to hold onto so tightly that you can form a cult around it.

However, my main point about education being important was seen in the use of analogous thinking. I found it surprising that even though children of a certain age can be shown how one person solved a problem, they have difficulty using that information to solve a very similar problem, until they are asked to repeat what happened in the previous example. This seems to be some indication that without educational experiences, children could not make certain leaps in their thinking. Of course, over time, children gain general experience with the world that they can use to solve certain types of problems, but if they don’t go out and handle objects and work with gravity and trajectories and those sorts of things, they will never have an ability to solve some of the problems that come up in the daily life of an adult.

Sign Language in Infants

2007-11-02T16:13:00.000-07:00

So although I agree that infants who learn to use sign language in infancy learn it more quickly when taught very early, I have a few problems with the overall idea of learning sign language as a better way to communicate with young babies.
First of all, there is significant research to suggest that there is a critical period for language learning in which children's brain's seem to grasp the concepts of language more quickly than during any other period in their lives. If this is the case, how is it that children find it easier to communicate through sign language than speaking language if they supposedly occur at the same time in both hearing and non-hearing infants? So, let's say, the problem for children in speaking to their parents is that their vocal chords aren't fully developed to the point of speaking clearly, why is it then that non-hearing children also have babbling tendencies through signing? It seems that if in fact it was a lack of vocal chord development wouldn't this babbling phenomenon occur just in hearing children?
Another problem I have with this theory of early understanding through sign language is the notion that children can understand signs earlier than they can understand speech, how is this possible? It's not that I don't think that infants can understand signs, I've seen it and know that this is something these infants can in fact do, but why is it that we believe that infants can more easily understand a gesture made in their direction than a word spoken to them. Because "motherese" has been proven to be infants preferred way to be spoken to, how does this translate to sign language? There is no way to soften signs or make them more preferable to infants ears so I find it very difficult to believe that infants would prefer signs to speech.
Because I have seen children utilize sign language to achieve their desires I do not doubt that it is possible for infants to learn this type of communication, I just have a hard time believing that the preference and skill required is as black and white as some parents would like to believe.

children logical reasoning and adults.

2007-11-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

Two types of logical reasoning are deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. As we know Deductive reasoning is process in which true previous premises or experiences draw a more general conclusion about a problem or reasoning; it's the reasoning that goes from general premises to a particular reasoning. For example,
All roses smell good,
some roses are flowers,
some flowers smell good.
Inductive reasoning is the complement of deductive; it basically goes from generalizing experiences and make a conclusion bases on this general premise or idea. For example.
My nephew when went to Peru, went to this old cemetery. In that place for lack of space instead of burring the deceased citizens on just regular ground, people are buried in cement walls along with many other, each independently in a portion of this wall. Then when he was back from Peru, my aunt asked her if he wanted to go back to Peru. He's answer was " No I don't because I don't want to be buried in a whole in the wall. Of course we laughed but now that I read the inductive and deductive reasoning. I understand that children usually make this mistakes and compare previous experiences and get into conclusion that might be sometimes true as well as erroneous. My nephew thought

All people living here are buried in wholes in the wall; therefore:
I'm going to be buried in wholes here.

Children deductive and inductive reasoning are sometimes considered as guesses. They fail to conclude circumstances that might not happen or might not logically occur. We tend to develop skillful analogies, use better our imaginary representations, and use better our logical reasoning maybe because of experience, instruction in school and the use of basic logic resources and concepts in math problems and physics. As adults we do learn to think more abstractly and test our premises better than children, but adults make also mistake involving deductive and inductive reasoning such as:

When it rains, the floor gets wet; therefore whenever the floor is wet, it rained.

Here we can see the clear evidence that the last conclusion is erroneous.

Another example imght be
If Ben doesn't clean his room, he doesn't get 1o dollars....Then:

if Ben got 10 dollars, it means he clened his room

If his room is clean he gets 10 dollars....

These two other conclusion can be true, but is not certain that every time he room is clean he gets his dollar or whenever he gets 10 dollars, Ben cleaned his bedroom.

Adults can get into conclusions by either using deductive reasoning or inductive reasoning and get erroneous conclusion in our daily life experiences. The most uncertain conclusion or reasoning is to be said inductive because it draws conclusions from general premises to a more particular or specific conclusion.; therefore inductive reasoning is more likely to be not certain.

The Pineapple Thief, A Story About Means-End Analysis

2007-11-02T15:45:00.001-07:00

I'd seen my brothers son Jalen do many things but I'd never seen him take a want/need (pineapple) and make a plan to acquire it. After reading chapter 10 and coming across the means-end analysis, this was the first thing to come to mind.

Children are problem solvers; I'm confident in saying that. But I was surprised to what degree someone as small as 2 years old could go to in order to achieve their overall goal. The situation involved me going over to my brothers house for dinner, I wasn't the only person, it was some sort of family get together. The pizza had just arrived and everyone was sitting around the living room eating. Enter Jalen (his 2ish year old son at the time).

Jalen was a pineapple hound growing up. If there was pineapple on anything he wanted all of it. So naturally one of the pizzas was Hawaiian style. O.k., so Jalen got his normal piece of pizza, picked off the pineapple, ate it, left the rest of the pizza alone and started his rounds. Walking up to everyone, he would body up to your leg and just peer at your plate, if you had pineapple on your pie he would stick around until you made an offering to him. No pineapple equalled no Jalen and he would move on.

So Jalen had made the rounds and no one had pineapple left to offer. He knew what the pizza boxes looked like and he made his way to the kitchen. Sitting atop the dinning room table (which he could see through the clear glass table) was his holy grail, the pizza boxes, and they were left alone unguarded. But the little guy can't reach them, because what do you do when a 2 year old wants something and you don't want him to get it, you put it on top of the table so he can't get reach it.

I remember looking back at him and making a comment to someone about how weird it was that he was just standing looking up at the pizza boxes. Looking back on the situation Jalen must have been making a mental model of what he needed to do to boost his height and reach those boxes. Using a means-end analysis he plotted out his next move.

I'd seen Jalen climb atop a dinning room chair a million times. But only when they were sitting out in the open of the living room, and usually it happened when a lot of people were around to oh and ah about how brave he was to climb up like that. So him getting up on a chair really was no big thing.

Jalen had a plan he just needed to execute. Step one was to get a chair, no easy feat because they were all occupied. He got one though. Step two, move the chair back to the dining room. Once again, not that easy, they are fairly heavy chairs. Step three, position said chair in a way so he could climb up and still be able to reach the top of the table. Step four was simply to claim his prize. Jalen did just that, he claimed all the pineapple off the pizza.

When something like that happens you don't really think about what is going on, you just think about how cute that was. But what is really going on is this little 2 year old is acquiring the processes necessary to deal with life's little obstacles, be it acquiring pineapple like he did, or something larger and more important later in life. He came up with a plan and executed in the proper manner to reach his goal. If that's not using means-end analysis I don't know what is.

Sign Language in Infants

2007-11-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

The other evening I was watching the news and there was a story on a local class that was being taught here in Eugene that teaches infants how to sign. Not deaf babies but babies who are absolutely capable of hearing. This is a new craze that parents are trying to teach their infants. For years parents have been teaching their babies to sign but not until recently classes are being offered to help parents teach signing.
These classes are offered at the Eugene Park and Recreation Center, by a woman who believes sign language is going to be the future way to communicate with you infants. Dr. Kathy Faber is widely known for her research and teaching of sign language. She has taught in Europe and all across the US and she is now bringing her services here in Eugene.
Some parents are capable of telling what their babies want by recognizing the type of crying their infants do. Some babies have high pitch screams when they need to be changed and others have long drawn out cries when they are hungry. But not all babies have the same pattern. Teaching infants how to sign, can give you a better idea of what they want. Dr. Faber said the whole craze started to limit babies from crying and whining over their frustrations because of their limit of communication with their parents. One parent of these classes says that her 3 month year old can’t sign but he can recognize what she is signing. The signs that are being taught are simple gesture that infants are capable of doing. A simple gesture like food, more, drink, diaper, bed, mommy, and daddy are the most popular signs being taught. If your infant could communicate what exactly they wanted crying and whining would be lessened.
Psychologists who have investigated this new craze say that infants understand language before their vocal cords develop. This is not surprising to me because we have learned that infants can count and recognize many other complex things before they could speak. The University of Wisconsin has done extensive research on the effects of infants who have learned sign language. They have concluded that infants who learn sign language have a larger vocabulary and will develop a higher IQ compared to infants who don’t learn sign language. Children who are taught sign language are more capable of learning a second language later in life. These infants can also learn how to speak earlier than other infants who have not learned sign language.

One of the things that I found to be fascinating that babies who signing go through something called “signing exposure” which is similar to vocal languages. Once a baby learns a few signs and realizes that signing will get them what they want and their ability to learn signs faster becomes evident. This is similar to the critical period of language development, once an infant learns a few words they make connection with other words, then they go through a stage where the learn words very rapidly. These are exciting finding that might change the way children are raised.

Gopnik's Blinket machine and one year olds

2007-11-02T15:01:00.001-07:00

While I was listening to the section on Gopnik's Blinket machine, I couldn't help but wonder if this study or way of studying covariation could be used in children under the age of two. I work at the parenting center Birth to Three with a One's group and it seems to me that I have witnessed children using their reasoning of covariation. One child for example was using a toy which had one button which made the toy play music and light up, it also had several other knobs on it which also resembled buttons. Although there were several other "choices" the child continuously chose the correct button which made the toy turn on. I purpose that if a less complicated toy than the blinket machine could be created it would enable further investigation of younger children and their abilities. A toy which had different buttons on them but only one made the toy flash and one only made the toy play sound. You could tell the child to make the toy flash and play music. Instead of requiring that the child tell which button initiates the sounds and flashing the child could simply be observed. I hypothesize that the child would try the different buttons and be able to identify which ones were the "blinkets" and which ones were not, just as the older children had. You would have to make sure that the buttons were all the same size in order to control for size preferences in children of this age. You could also test covariation on younger children using some sort of looking experiment.
Although this is a rough sketch of an experiment and there could potentially be numerous down falls, I do however feel that it would be very beneficial to see if younger children have this ability. I am sure that Gopnik could come up with a better, more solid experiment.

The Planning Process Appears Throughout Life

2007-11-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

Planning is a factor humans use to solve issues within their every day lives. Planning is a central part of organizing business affairs, determining daily schedules, children’s activities and more, it acts as the basis for many individuals daily activities. Within planning we focus on the future, we attempt to determine what will occur in the future and how to make future occurrences happen. To take a more narrow look into planning we can look at the means-ends analysis previously discussed in class. For our purposes we use the means-ends analysis to describe an infant and child’s mode of planning. However, this is a process individuals use in their every day lives from infancy to adulthood. By reducing differences between our goals and current situation humans and infants can develop a process to reach those goals successfully.
The development of means-ends analysis eventually results in an ability to remember sub-goals in order to solve long term problems. The older an individual gets the more steps they can remember to attain their specific goal and will thus eventually develop a procedure for meeting the sub-goals necessary to attain the ultimate goal. An example of this is shown in Klahr (1989) and the "Tower of Hanoi" problem. A child must make their display look exactly like the researcher’s display using seven moves and only two rules: move only one can at a time, and never place a smaller can on a larger one. The children observed are from ages 2 to 6 years and show significant differences in their approaches to planning to reach their goal. Which relay the theory that as we develop our approaches to problem solving and planning get more advanced and sophisticated. Means-ends analysis can be fully related to a college student’s life. For example, currently I wish to eventually get a highly paid job, this is my goal and it can be attained a number of ways. The procedure I have chosen to reach my goal is separated into sub-goals. In order to reach my goal I have determined I need to attend college and get a degree. First I must apply to the college and get accepted. Then, I must take the courses necessary to obtain a degree in a specific field of study. Third, I must pass the courses I am enrolled in to get my degree. This requires many hours of study and attending lectures to do so. Fourth, if I follow sub-goals one through three I will receive my diploma. I then must continue the process toward my goal and apply for jobs I recognize as having the ability to be highly paid. I will have to interview with companies and produce a successful interview that will make the company of my choice choose me over other candidates. In doing all this I will finally acquire my highly paid job and thus attain my goal. Without planning toward a goal such as attaining a highly paid job or in a child’s case the "Tower of Hanoi" problem, an individual will never have the ability to reach their objectives. The process of planning requires steps or sub-goals to be entirely successful.
In my eyes means-ends analysis is the basis to problem solving and planning. Without ones ability to break down the steps towards their ultimate goal, it would seem insurmountable to achieve the goal. By using sub-goals in an ordered sequence to approach future goals we can clearly see how to attain our objectives. The fact we have been doing this in some way or another our entire lives has been proven to develop a method of thinking highly advanced in human beings.

forming categories

2007-11-02T14:35:00.000-07:00

In the article by Gelman (1994), she asserted that people will form categories based on physical, surface features, which, provides a means for assigning category membership. At the same time that this category is being formed, base on the intrinsic, unseen, underlying nature of the object, which is coined "essence" is being inferred about the object. Gelman shows that children are especially good at infering intrinsic properties in animals. Her research shows that 93% of children will refer to intrinsic properties of an animal to explain a biological event if no external cause for the event is present. Gelman also studied childrens assumptions about the innate potential of categories by asking them what the outcome for a kangaroo raised by a goat would be. She found that children will answer questions about animals in terms of category membership or innate potential, relying on knowledge about the nature of the animal, rather than the nurture the animal was given. Furthur research showed that 5 year-olds are very accurate at realizing that things can change as they grow (seed-tree, caterpillar-moth), and that it is the internal properties that are critical to the objects identity. They realized at this young age that "essences" will remain unchanged.
With all of this evidence showing that both categories and essences are learned or inferred at the same time, this leads me to think of how negative influence during this learning process can lead to prejudice. It appears that as children experience the world, they categorize the things that they observe, and make inferences about the nature of the the objects in these categories. If a child sees a person with a different skin color, and begins the automatic process of categorizing them, likely assigns similar essences that they have for themselves and other people. My question is this: to what degree will the child integrate this new person of different color into his/her same person category, and what influence do the parents have on assigning essences to this category? To try to answer this, I looked at an fMRI study by Jennifer Eberhart (2005). She examined people for differences in neurological processing of faces of different races. She found increased activations in many areas of the brain when observing faces of other races than that of faces of the participants race. This increased cortical activation is strongly correlated with areas involved in emotion and inhibition. These results suggest a possible hypothesis for my question: The essences of the different race, may be associated with negative emotion, and the increase inhibition may be due to conflict in the separation of the category that that is based on surface clues rather than internal properties of the other person. This still leaves the question of what role the parent plays in the assignment of essences to this race category. I hypothesize that the the parents input about that person; good or bad will become internalized in the child, thus, reinforcing the formation of a sub-category based on external rather than internal cues about the person. This internalization and categorization may account for the deep prejudice observed in some people.

Innateness of Language Acquisition

2007-11-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

Chomsky and Lenneberg propose that language is innate and that there is a critical period that ends around puberty, where children are no longer able to learn the rules of language. It is true that there seems to be language functions in certain parts of the brain, which suggests that language may be innate. The fact that there is a critical period for language acquisition seems to support that everyone has the potential to learn a language. If a child lives the first part of their life without any other human contact, they will never be able to learn language like children who are spoken to and raised lovingly by their parents. With all the studies that suggest we have a part of the brain that is used for language, why is it that children who are not exposed to language will never learn it correctly? Genie, for example was a feral child who was locked up until she was thirteen and punished when she vocalized. She could speak about twenty words which seems strange to me, because if babies babble and eventually start speaking, one would think that Genie would also babble as a baby and eventually start to form some sort of language if there is a part of the brain for language acquisition. In some cultures, parents do not speak directly to their children and they still learn their native language without problems. How can this be if Genie was in the same situation and never learned to speak? This brings up the point that language is acquired through nature and nurture. It is obvious through this example that children need to hear and experience language if they are able to form it themselves. However, the rapidity at which children learn language shows that there must be some innateness in the task.

So if language is acquired by nature and nurture, how is it that deaf children can still learn language if they have never heard it spoken? American Sign Language (ASL) is a full language that has the components of a spoken language, so maybe the parts of the brain that help with acquisition can be applied to signs as well as words. But what about children who are hearing that have deaf parents? Do they learn language as well as children with hearing parents? One difference in having deaf parents is that the child must look at the parent and learn to interpret the signs. Deaf parents understand that a child’s visual perspective is important, and that the child must pay attention to understand. However, hearing parents may not fully understand that a deaf baby responds more to visual stimulus because they can’t hear.

An interesting phenomenon is the learning of a second language, after the critical period has already passed. If Genie was never able to correctly learn even a first language after she was rescued, how is it that adults can learn a second language? If a person is able to learn a first language, they already understand the structure and concept of language, so maybe they can apply their knowledge of language in general to the new one they are learning. An example of this is adults learning ASL. It is similar to learning a foreign language, because even in this case people will never be a fluent as they are in their native language. However, children who learn ASL are able to master the language, even when they learn from someone who does not sign properly. This is further evidence of the critical period, because if children are able to fill in the gaps that they are not taught, there must be some innateness language acquisition.

Biological Understanding

2007-11-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

I was outside yesterday playing tag while babysitting for three little girls of the ages 4, 6, and 10. The youngest girl ran across a feather lying on the ground and picked it up to show the rest of us. Immediately after telling her sisters about the amazing find she had just made, both girls began to scold her and warn her of the diseases the feather contains. The six year old repeated that birds are dirty while the ten year old shrieked that she would catch the "bird flu" from the feather. After struggling to aruge that she had touched feathers before and not gotten sick, the four year old finally dropped the feather and ran into the house crying that she didn't want the "bird disease." Each of these children displays a different level of understanding of the biological process and is at a different stage of her mental development.
According to the criteria for biological understanding outlined in the chapter, Conceptual Development, the ten year old displays a clear understanding that germs can be found on matter from other living creatures and can cause illness. This is a concept she states, "Mom said," implying that her knowledge of feathers causing diseases is a nurtured concept passed on from her mother. She does not connect it with being a disgusting object but simply something undesirable to touch in order to avoid the consequences. The six year old understands the concept of illness, but is still having trouble distinguishing between biological reactions and emotional reactions. She believes that the feather is "yucky" and is therefore going to make her sick. She is however able to distinguish between the yucky-ness of the feather and the yucky-ness of green beans. The feather is found outdoors and is from a living creature that may carry germs. Green beans are yucky because they taste bad but they will not give you a disease if you eat them. Finally, the four year old displays a fairly naive understanding of illness. First, she believes in the "all or none" scenario where if she has touched one feather and not gotten sick she can therefore touch all feathers without getting sick. Once her sisters are able to persuade her to think differently, she thinks she will become immediately sick and begins to cry. She has no conceptual knowledge of the slow development of illnesses and the process of how germs pass.
The biological cue that all three children and their mother misinterpreted is that most diseases cannot pass from birds to humans becuase of the genetic basis of disease. Just as dogs with illnesses do not generally get their owners sick, disease carried by birds generally cannot cause humans to become ill. Such knowledge is not widely known in the general public and often causes scares such as the "bird flu" paranoia that circulated several years ago. Such differences in the level of biological understanding cause me to think that the majority of this type of conceptual development is due to nurture. People are not predetermined to learn false information about biology. We learn the majority of our knowledge of how the world works through teaching and through direct experience with the world. We must observe and test our own theories in nature everyday so we continually nurture the concept of biological processes.

World without Development

2007-11-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

In the first part of the week, we talked about children’s conceptual and theory development in class. Conceptual development basically helps children make sense of the world. I think it is critical to have concepts develop in us; I thought about a world where people living there do not have conceptual development, and it was very different. People would never be able to group things together into categories, such as having bats and humans all called mammal, and also would not understand that all members in a category share some common features. In the world without conceptual development, I imagine that people would often be confused and have curiosity. Since people cannot category things according to their features, they would need to examine every new things each time they encounter a new object. For example, seeing other people from other parts of the world, they would not be able to tell right away that they are human as well, since people from different parts of the world may not look exactly the same. Thus, it would be time consuming to live in a world without conceptual development; we would need to spend a lot more time in our lives on just simple examine each and every objects that we see.

In the second part of the week, we talked about reasoning and problem solving. I believe that this is another big step in children’s development. Come to think of it, basically almost everything we do in our daily life is related with reasoning and problem solving. For example, when driving a car, we need to solve the problem of where we are going and what road should I take to get there; when writing a blog, we need to first understand the material, and solve the problem and reason out of what we want to write about. Thus, a world where people have no reasoning and problem solving skills would probably be malfunctioning and dangerous.

essentialism

2007-11-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

Something that struck me as interesting in this weeks classes was Susan Gelman’s idea about essentialism. The idea that within a category there is some underlying “essence” that is universally true for members of said category. I think this theory is very applicable to children’s problem solving, and categorization, and is even evident in adult ways of thinking. The underlying essence is not something that can necessarily be named. For example cats and dogs share a number of different features, from the role they play in people’s lives to their physical appearance, yet we are very comfortable differentiating between them. For example, my mom has a Great Dane, who is very similar prototypical dog in appearance and behavior, my best friend has two cats who are very similar to the prototypical cat, and my sister has a toy poodle who looks and acts more like my friend’s cats than my mom’s dog (similar to the bat and bird example used in class). She is little and soft, she sits on laps, she jumps up on things most dogs wouldn’t be allowed to, and even eats out of cat dishes and wears cat collars because of her size. Yet we call my sister’s poodle (Tobie) a dog, not a cat. Of course, as adults we can look at Tobie and say that she was breed from larger dogs to be little, looking at the Standard poodle that she was breed down from and we can point to her genealogy to prove that she is in fact a dog, not a cat. The essentialism article talks about this kind of adult categorization; “Adults sometimes refrain from classifying together things that seem superficially the same but in theory-relative properties” (343). But little kids can’t do things, and none of them label her as a cat. This implies that there is something about Tobie’s essence that is canine, because her being categorized, by children, as a dog is obviously not based on her looks or behavior. In fact, Gelman points out that while children do this, they might not be able to tell you why they do. They would consistently call Tobie a dog, but if asked why Tobie is a dog, not a cat, they might have a hard time coming up with an answer. The Gelman et al article states that adults and especially children will sometimes use the theory-based classification without knowing the theory, and this accounts for why they can’t always explain why they categorized something the way they did. According to the article, essences don’t have to be observable at all, this is certainly true in the Tobie example, the reading used the example of a whale not being a fish.
There was some dispute in the essentialism article about whether or not adults still categorize things like this. I think that they do, at least to a certain extent. It is a more modernist perspective to use this type of cemented thinking, that there is some underlying defining feature in any classification. While it might be important in childhood classification, it can quickly become a limiting way of thinking in adulthood. If one doesn’t allow more fluidity in categorization they can make unfortunate assumptions that can lead to problems. For example race or gender issues. If people believe these constructs to be more concretely defined we may run into problem of unfair grouping, or the exclusion of members that don’t fit in to any category. Essentialist thinking can lead to misguided thinking. We talked about some anecdotal examples in class about thinking you will get personality traits of an organ donor, or believing that people of one race are more genetically different from another race, but these and other examples of essentialist thinking in adults can be dangerous. It can lead to assumptions about abilities biased on race, gender, or some other category one might happen to be a part of. Postmodernism has tried to combat this way of thinking, but more work is needed. It is important to think about where we get these types of ideas, because I would bet we are all guilty of categorizing things and assuming things based on our categorization, with little proof to support our assumptions. It is really interesting how something that is so important in childhood can linger into adulthood in a less positive way.

Defining-Features Representations Restored.

2007-11-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

When my cousin, Samuel, was two or three years old, he thought that all Daddies were Indian, and all Mommies were Chinese. At first glance, this might seem like a really strange idea to have, but it’s really not all that surprising. The thing is, my father is Indian, and on his side of the family I have two uncles, one of whom is my cousin’s father. All three of them (my father and both uncles) married Chinese women and so all my cousins are “Chindians”, as we’re called in Malaysia. Thus, in the early years of his life, Samuel would have come into contact with mainly Indian Daddies and Chinese Mommies, which led to his unusual conclusion.

Samuel wasn’t only exposed to relatives growing up – he met other Mommies and Daddies too. Therefore he would’ve met other Daddies and Mommies who weren’t Indian and Chinese respectively. However, he spent most of his time within his nuclear and extended family, so the “being Indian” feature was a high cue validity for Daddies, as was the “being Chinese” feature for Mommies. As he grew up, he began to learn what exactly makes a Mommy and a Daddy. He was taught that anyone who had children was a Mommy is she was a girl, and a Daddy if he was a boy. Despite the fact that he was still mainly exposed to his nuclear and extended family, he now knew that race does not have a causal relationship with Mommy- and Daddyhood. His categories of Daddies and Mommies were both broadened and limited by this new information that he now had, and were also more accurate.

My point to this analogy is that the three theories of conceptual representations need not be seen as mutually exclusive, but can instead be combined to form a single continuous and dynamic theory of how children’s conceptual representations develop. While probabilistic representations and theory-based representations are seen to complement each other, the defining-features representations theory is often deemed too basic and therefore obsolete. I beg to differ – I think the defining-features theory might very well be the culmination of children’s conceptual representations.

Going back to my analogy, Samuel first used probabilistic representations to form his categories of Daddies and Mommies. He could not have used defining features, as he was exposed to parents of other races, neither could he have used theory-based representations because he did not know what caused a person to be a Mommy or a Daddy. The second step in Samuel’s representations of Mommies and Daddies was theory-based – he learnt what “made” Mommies and Daddies. Based on what he learnt, he could then form defining features of Mommies and Daddies – Mommies were girls who had children, and Daddies were boys who had children.

Mommies and Daddies aside, this process of forming conceptual representations can be seen in many other instances. Under the Naïve Biology theory, for example, children first start off by categorizing living and non-living objects based on motion. Most of the things they are exposed to early in life that aren’t alive don’t move – their teddy bear, their blanket, and their bottle, for instance. They would almost definitely have some experience with plants, and might even be told that the plant is alive and can die. However, as the vast majority of inanimate objects they experience are non-living, non-motion is a high cue validity for non-living objects and thus their categories of living and non-living objects are formed.

Later on, they are taught either formally or informally about what exactly makes living things “alive”. They learn about respiration, reproduction and nutrition, to name a few, that is causally related with “alive-ness”. Using these theory-based representations, they then modify and possibly do away with the probabilistic representations they had, if need be, and identify the defining features that categorize living and non-living things. This categorization would be more accurate than the one formed using probabilistic representations.

One of the weaknesses that have been identified for defining-features representations is that there are some concepts that do not have defining features – I don’t think this is true because these defining features are there; it’s just a matter of learning what they are. Probabilistic representations, on the other hand, have the weakness of possibly being and remaining inaccurate if not coupled with theory-based representations. The two combined then result in defining-features representations, and so these two processes are in fact the way in which we learn what the defining features for a concept are.

In summary, with limited knowledge and experience, children use cue validities when faced with novel objects and experiences. When they gain more knowledge about those objects and experiences, they might be able to form theory-based representations which they can then use to form defining-features representations. If these defining-features representations coincide with their probabilistic representations, all the better, but if they don’t, then the defining-features representations take precedence. This proves the relevance, and indeed the superiority, of defining-features representations over probabilistic and theory-based representations.

critical period

2007-11-02T09:36:00.000-07:00

Sarah Ennis

Lennenberg’s hypothesis in 1967 proposed a critical period for language learning. He inferred that infants must be exposed to their a language within a window of time, beginning early in infancy until puberty when the lateralization of the brain is complete, in order to properly learn language. At the time Lennenberg proposed this theory little evidence was available to support this claim. Over the years however, researchers have collected plenty of convincing evidence that support the notion of a critical period of language acquisition.

I think some of the most compelling evidence for a critical period besides the Nicaraguan Sign Language discussed in class is study by Johnson and Newport (1989), which examined the grammatical abilities of Chinese and Korean immigrants. The immigrants in this study ranged from 3 to 39 years of age. All of the immigrants had been living in the U.S. between 3 and 26 years. Each individual was tested on his or her grammatical mastery of the English language. The results indicated that immigrants who came before age 7 knew as much grammar as a native-born adult. Those who came between the ages of 8 and 10 knew it slightly less well; those who came 11 to 15 knew it somewhat less well; and only a few of those who came after the age of 15 acquired any grammar skill at all (Johnson & Newport, 1989). This remarkable study demonstrates that universally a critical period likely exists in order to learn language. It could be said that this study only demonstrates the likelihood of properly learning a second language and cannot be compared to learning an initial first language. However, because those individuals who migrated to the U.S. before the age of 7 scored comparable to native speaking adults this explanation is likely untrue.

It is easy to imagine how it would affect a child who is not exposed to any language at an early age if in fact a critical period does exist. There have been few instances when this phenomenon has unfortunately occurred. Like these instances, a child who is not exposed to language during a critical period will struggle with the ability to learn critical abilities like writing or the ability to acquire knowledge in school. The inability to master these two skills would especially impair the success of the child immediately and also later in life. Furthermore, children who do not properly acquire language would be unable to participate in a critical part of development: socialization. They would struggle with how to communicate or form relationships with others.

Language is the foundation for our ability to function, survive, and adapt to our environment. It the tool that gets us to where we want to go. Without it our opportunities to flourish in life and social relationships are greatly impaired. The overwhelming evidence supporting a critical period is important when we consider what can occur if we are unable to learn language.

Problem Solving Dilemmas

2007-11-02T06:43:00.000-07:00

In reading through chapter 10 of our book, and studying how children develop problem solving skills, I’ve been reflecting on how my own experiences relate. As depicted in the examples in the book, not all learning occurs on its own, developing over time; much of learning takes place through explicit teaching and learning from parents and teachers, not just general familiarization with the world around us. One glaring example for myself is that of the balance scales experiments – I would solve these problems following the Rule III model, even though I am (partially) college educated. I got a D- in high school physics, and have never been very good at any sort of physical reasoning; the mathematics surrounding such problems still just goes over my head. In the more complex questions, I find myself relying on semi-educated guesses. On the other hand, I think I got around a 500 on the English section of the SAT test back in the 8^th grade (my mom made me take it), largely from a boost from the (now-obsolete) analogy questions. I understand language-related problems much more competently than mathematic ones. Where along my schooling did such a divergence in talents occur, or was this pre-determined? Nature vs. nurture rears her ugly head again.

On a side note, I’m somewhat bothered by the well-educated authors’ repeated misuse of the word “metaphor”. I understand that these are most likely psychology instructors, and may have not taken an English class since high school, but an editor should have noticed. “A camera is like a tape recorder” is a simile, not a metaphor, as is the “child as scientist” comparison. As many may remember from back in middle school, the presence of “like” or “as” makes these phrases similes, not metaphors. This demonstrates my own inability to efficiently encode information, as inconsequential things like this catch my attention, not always the relevant content of the text.

gender theory and children

2007-11-01T21:27:00.000-07:00

Gelman (1994) maintains that children may “learn the “theory-based classification” before they learn the theory” (143). That they may know before to which system an item or object belongs before they know why it belongs to that particular group. This suggests that children know a lot about the world on an unconscious level. When discussing Keil’s belief that different transformations impact children’s idea of what is innate in identity we discussed two different types of transformations that may occur. One is a costume change and another being an operation change. It was found that children as young as four can identify that a costume change does not change the identity of an object.

They found that children believed that an operation would change the identity of an object. However, it was discussed that children are not as good at identifying gender as a stable identity. Children will tend to believe that changing the clothing of an individual changes their gender. Possible explanations for why this was the case included that gender is a unique category that may not be treated as a natural kind because gender cuts across many different categories of animals. I believe that there is perhaps another way of looking at why children have a difficult time believing gender to be a stable identity. I believe that they are correct when they maintain that it is not a stable identity and that essentially gender is rooted in biological sex it has been covered with many different “costumes”. For example, most people believe that what determines gender is the chromosomes one is born with, this is largely correct of sex but not of gender. Sex is determined by the chromosomes one is born with, xx or xy, but we know that even on a chromosomal level it is not always this clear people are often born with three chromosomes and different combinations of chromosomes. People may argue that people with differences in their chromosomes are the result of mutations and that the “standard” is to either have xx or xy, that is true but sex is far more complicated than just chromosomes. Sex, or at least genital development is also determines by hormones. There are people in the world with xy chromosomes that appear to be female on the outside because they have an insensitivity to the “male” hormones that allow a person to develop male genitals. There are many other variations of “intersex” individuals who contain elements of male and female genitalia. But beyond mere biology which determines sex there is also a wide range of hormone levels in every individual. Some “men” have more testosterone than other biological “men” and some women have more hormones than other women. Women also often have differing amounts of “male” hormones in their bodies. Gender is separate from sex in many different ways, gender is the public image of ones sex. A person may have testes inside and a vagina and breast on the outside or maybe they take steps to change their appearance on the outside to match how they feel on the inside, such as transsexuals. There are plenty of “tomboys” and effeminate men, both of which do not fit the traditional standards of gender. Therefore maybe young children are seeing a sort of “theory based classification” to which the rest of us are simply unaware there is a theory to. Perhaps gender is not as stable an identity that we like to imagine and it is covered in many “costumes” such as hormones and clothing and socialized behaviors and beliefs.

Essentialism, concepts, and surprises.

2007-11-01T20:21:00.000-07:00

Schemas, stereotypes, concepts, theories, beliefs. These are all terms which have been mentioned in class discussion to help explain how we, as humans, group objects, people, and events in the world into efficient categories. Certainly no one expects all of these concepts to be completely correct, but it is amazing that we can even develop such an elaborate network of theories about the world and how it works. It is interesting to note that these concepts are often formed based on what is most useful to us, rather than what is correct. As children, and even adults, explore the world, they find ample evidence to establish categories, and to refine the catogories they have already established. The theory of essentialism suggests that we believe animals and objects have a deep, true "nature" or "essence" that makes them what they are. As I will elaborate later, it is interesting to think about how contradictory evidence about the "nature" of a category might prompt us to wrestle with our concepts.
So how do we develop these concepts, or theories in the first place? The classic "defining features" view suggests that each concept or category has a set of necessary and sufficient attributes that its members must have to belong to that category ("necessary" means it is a required attribute, and "sufficient" means that the given attributes define the category). While this seems simple enough, one finds that it can be difficult to categorize certain items, or to label which attributes separate different categories. The "probabilistic" view suggests that we group members into a category using cue validities, or how predictive an attribute is of one category compared to another category. If a member has strong cue validities, it is typical; the basic level is the category level at which cue validities are greatest. We use the terms for basic level categories most often in everyday language (i.e. car, dog, flower v. volkswagen, terrier, daisy). But what is the underlying reason of category membership? The "theory" view explains this, and can be viewed in conjunction with the "probabilistic" view. The theory view suggests that there are causal explanations for why members belong to a certain group. The "theory" theory extends a form of this idea to all of cognitive development, stating that children are "little scientists" who develop and revise their theories based on their experience. One explanation of the nature of these theories is Essentialism. Whew, that was a bit long.
Okay, so back to Essentialism. There is ample evidence that both children and adults use essentialism as they create and manage concepts. For example, young children, who are generally very sensitive to perceptual stimuli, will attribute the characteristic of a category member to a new animal, rather than the characteristic of a perceptually similar animal (bird v. bat study). Adults assumed that people of the same race would always have more similar DNA that people of different races (DNA compared to essence). From personal experience, I would say that essentialism can often be applied to more complex concepts as well, such as social or religious groups, topics of study, etc., in addition to natural things and artifacts. I often will find evidence to contradict a new concept I've developed, and find myself asking (not in so many words perhaps), "Well, if this new information is true, what really is a ____?" This question reflects the crux of essentialism: that a true "essence" exists for everything, even if we don't know what it is. As I find new information, I revise my theory of what the category's "essence" is, but even if new information contradicts my theory, I just alter my theory. I don't discard the assumption that the essence exists.

BladeRunner

2007-11-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Since we have been talking about essences I haven’t been able to stop thinking about BladeRunner. Besides it being a really good movie for the time, it brings up a lot of what we have been discussing. It’s set in the future, and robotic technology has gotten to the point were just by looking at “someone” you can’t tell whether they are human or a robot. Harrison Ford’s job in the movie is to seek out robots that are posing as humans and destroy them, but it turns out that he is a robot too. Now from what I can remember the reason that robots had to be hunted in the first place was because some of them had been flagged as dangerous and had a predisposition to kill. The reason I’m bringing all this up is that in addition to our ability to use both physical and mental tools problem-solve setting us apart from other animals, I think this possibly makes us stand out just as much. In a round about way we discuss this ability all the time in class, like when we talked about pragmatics in language. The most successful among us, with some exceptions, knows to take what they are presented with a grain of salt and not be fooled by outward appearances. Lower animals clearly don’t have this, that monkey that clung to a wire frame its mother with a cloth wrapped around it is a good example. Or maybe it’s just that we are a lot more sensitive differences. I say more sensitive because there are clearly situations where we can be fooled, even by ourselves. Movies touch on these sorts of themes all the time. The Matrix was a whole world that perfectly mimicked the real thing, but the reality for those people was horribly different. All of this is interesting because it seems like we may have at least one part instilled in our biology, and that’s the longing for honesty, and genuine interactions. The reason that Picasso’s paintings are so valued above a copy is because it’s scary to think that we too could be replaced. Being self-aware we know that we are one of a kind, so we transfer this to the important things and people around us. Maybe the reason we are this way and we have this ability is because it makes us more conserving and protective of what we value the most.

Children's understanding of Biology

2007-11-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

Children differ in the their understanding of living and dead. They do not grasp the concept of being dead the same way adults do, which requires abstract thinking. Children view death as a departure in which someone leaves but they may return. They do not understand that death is irreversable and that it's part of a life cycle. To them death is also assimilated with sleep from where one can awake.
Psychoanalytics comment that preschoolers lack a biological understanding of death, meaning that young children do not see death as inevitable or irreversible. Piaget's concept of death confirms that children do not have a good understanding of death and life until about the age of 10 in which they are better able to understand what makes something alife.
Researchers that follow Piaget's tradition suggest that changes in children's understanding of death forms from transitions from preoperational to concrete operational and from formal operational stages of cognitive development.

In the preoperational stage children beleive that death is reversible but not until the concrete operational stage do they grasp the concept that death is irreversible. In the concrete operational stage they do not understand that death is part of our life cycle and that all living things must die at some point in time. The final stage, the formal operational stage allows abstract thinking and it is in this stage that we are able to grasp the whole concept of living vs dead.

Living vs Nonliving : Children do understand that animals and humans are both living things but they have a hard time grasping the concet that plants are also living things. Later in school they learn that what makes something alive is being able to reproduce and grow. School gives them the opportunity to care for animals and plants and there they learn what it takes for something to grow and live. In class we have talked about the essentialim theory, I find this theory very intersting. I think that it is amazing how from an early age we are able to know what is living and what is not and how we have an ability to classify things in groups without having much knowledge even though they may not always look alike.
We acquire our knowledge of non living and living things through learning in our environment as well from our deep understanding that we acquire even when we are little.

Essentialism

2007-11-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

In learning about children’s conceptual development, I have been very intrigued with the concept of naïve biology, essentialism in particular. Part of the reason that I find it so intriguing is that it has been hard to completely wrap my mind around. The reason for this, I believe, is that essentialism plays a subconscious role in the development of concepts and is, therefore, something that people take for granted. That is, children seem to innately possess ideas that “categories of things in the world have a true, underlying nature or essence that causes things to be in particular categories,” which is Susan Gelman’s definition of essentialism.
I also found the evidence of essentialism to be very interesting. This evidence shows that children are able to form and hold concepts about various things without having any prior knowledge about the particular concept. The first piece of evidence, inductive potential, the ability of young children (4 and 5 year olds) to group things into categories even though a member of a category may appear as if it belongs to as different category, supports the notion that very young children have an innate understanding that certain things belong to together in the same category because they share a certain essence.
Innate dispositions, a second piece of evidence of essentialism, involve the idea that nature is sometimes stronger than nurture. In other words, young children are able to recognize that you cannot change the disposition of something, such as an animal, by taking it out of its natural environment and rearing it somewhere else. Innate dispositions suggest that young children possess the ability to accurately predict the behavior of a particular organism based on an innate understanding of the nature of that organism.
The third piece of evidence that we discussed was maintenance of identity, which shows that children seem to understand for the most part that you cannot change the identity of an organism or an object by disguising it. However, younger children have some difficulty realizing that you cannot change the identity of an organism by operating on that object. The ability of children to recognize that you cannot change the identity of an object or organism by making superficial changes to it once again shows that children have an innate understanding that the identity of things do not change by altering them superficially.
Essentialism proves to be a useful because it allows people to hold an idea about a particular object or organism without knowing exactly why the object or organism is the way it is. However, essentialism can also produce and perpetuate false concepts. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that from a very young age children are able to understand their surrounding world based on their knowledge of the underlying essence of the objects and organisms around them.

Essences and children

2007-11-01T17:13:00.000-07:00

The topic that I would like to focus on for this week’s blog has to do with essences and what children know about them. Just as a refresher, essences determine the shared underlying structure of category members. Different researchers have noted that children have some understanding of this idea when they are very young (four years old). However, their development of using essences does not fully develop until later. This brings me to the Frank Keil study. His study wanted to see whether or not children would label something as “changed” or the “same” based on different transformations. There were two types of transformations: costumes and operations. There were two types of objects: natural kinds and artifacts. When Keil performed this study he found that four year olds think that if an object (or animal) has an operation, then it is changed. He also found that second graders will label an artifact as changed from an operation but they will not accept a change if it was performed on a natural thing. This shows that as children develop, their understanding about essences gradually grows. I just have a hard time believing that children at the age of four really understand this. Also there have been some researchers that have thought that this may be innate. I do not agree with this either. They say that preschoolers can distinguish between traits that are more likely to be nature or nurture. I think that children are learning these abilities. A four year old has some knowledge about this because from Keil’s study, we can suggest that four year olds understand that costumes do not change something. But for this to be innate, wouldn’t they have to know that operations do not change it either? They still accept transformations on artifacts by the time they are in the second grade. It just seems that they have more experience with these things, and that is why their development of this is more gradual. One thing that I would like to know more about is whether or not children use any other heuristics at young ages. I took the cognition class last spring. We talked about many different heuristics that we use every day. Since essentialism is a heuristic, I think it would be very helpful to compare whether or not children use other heuristics. One last thing that I think would help shed more light on this subject would be to test what children say about humans and transformations. I would like to know what children would say about a human that got an operation. It almost seems that children can understand essences when they have had experiences with it before. We talked in class about how most children know that a costume does not change who you are because of Halloween. They have had contact with using costumes and dressing up. Something that many children have not experienced at a young age is operations. Of course there are also many children that have had operations at a young age, but I think it would be interesting to have a study that includes children that have had operations at a young age. Would they be able to understand that an operation does not change “you?”

Losing but Learning

2007-10-31T21:53:00.000-07:00

The process of learning for a child has many steps to it and many factors. One thing that is embedded in my head after all that we have learned about child development refers back to the way infants scan faces; the process of sub-cortical information developing into cortical information due to suppression. This is simply an example of what I’m trying to get across, which is the point that children have to use different types of perceptual and intellectual narrowing and inhibitory controls to be able to reach adult cognitive levels.
An example of the importance of suppressing a variable to get a better understanding of the whole picture would be Deloache’s study concerning symbolic development and dual representations. Deloache refined one of her experiments by prohibiting her subjects from physically touching or playing with the model, her reason being “that playing with and manipulating the model would make it more salient as an object hence would make dual representation more difficult to achieve.” (Deloache, 111) She “reasoned that denying children access to the model would decrease its salience as an object, hence making it easier for them to achieve dual representation.” (Deloach, 111) This goes with the idea of suppressing one aspect of cognition to help increase the chances of a child’ s ability to look beyond the surface. The study done by Markman on the topic of the mutual exclusivity assumption displays the difficulty children have accepting that one item can be two different things because of their assumption that a particular item cannot be called something else. In this case children had to suppress their prior knowledge and be open to the idea that particular things had more than one title (e.g. a dog can also be called a pet) Another example that was shown in class is the process of developing a means ends analysis, which is the ability to form subgoals that temporarily take you further from your goal in order to ultimately get closer to it (inhibitory control). This would relate to solving a rubik’s cube and having to take two steps backwards to reach the final product.
Real life examples of things in our daily lives that are lost or refined to adults compared with children are the abilities to play with no worries, to imagine and to pretend. These are some things that are ultimately suppressed because of our social environment and as children grow older they mature and lose some of their childlike characteristics. Ultimately children have to suppress and refine some of their characteristics and the way they perceive the world to make the transition into adulthood. Whether it be done through social learning or the process of coming to a better understanding of their surroundings and what it entails.

Young Male and Female Differences

2007-10-30T14:44:00.001-07:00

Although the Declaration of Independence states “…all [people] are created equal,” there are early male and female differences. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the “Father” of psycho-analytical thought, who theorized a mental/cognitive “psyche,” professed the psyche as made up of an “id, ego, and super-ego.” Firstly, the “id” (representative of want/desire), the “ego” (what a person expresses that they are able or can), and the “super-ego,” or (ultimately what should be).

Is a one-year-old’s choice of two cookies over one (male and female) a manifestation of a Freudian psyche? Is it relative to the “id,” because a youngster “wants” more cookies? Or is it more relative to the “ego,” because they can eat two cookies not just one? Or is it pre-/sub- super-egotism that they should respond in that manner because they are being tested.

What about the difference, relative to hormones (testosterone – male/estrogen – female) affecting the brain? Some say the main differentiating factor of a brain (male to female) are hormones. This is manifested in approximately one-year olds wherein a female can see the difference, not only between one’s and two’s (male and female), pretty much equally but also three’s and four’s (feminine way better performance than male at one year).

Freud spoke of male dominance and female envy. I feel that the “dominant” male one year old’s “psyche” feels more satiated and masculine with an equilibration and that one year old males, choosing cookies, feel they don’t need to expend the “psyche” metabolism (they don’t even see) four cookies over three. Contrapositively, a FEMININE one year old is not as dominant/satisfied/satiated and can be deficitual and envious, therefore more “psyche” metabolism, therefore a better “set” (term for expectation in the future) to compute, recognize and desire four cookies rather than three whereas the male one year old, ah, just doesn’t see the difference. The female one year olds seem to be quicker thinkers; the male one year olds slower thinkers.
In the experiment done as a necessary reading for class, the female one year olds are “dominant” in their ability to differentiate bigger numbers (three’s and four’s), and males lesser. Perhaps “estrogen” causes a one year old brain to metabolize more sugar and oxygen needed to accomplish this task of recognizing three’s and four’s, whereas the “testosterone” one year old “stays put” with less glucose and oxygen expenditure (less “psyche’ usage). If the one year old male was to see the one year old female after the choices of cookies with more cookies than him (male, choose: 2,2,3,2; when shown 2’s and 3’s four times, female, choose: 3,3,3,3; when shown 2’s and 3’s four times)…therefore nine cookies for the male/twelve cookies for the female. The male might be envious and the female dominant, a reciprocation of Freud’s designation. Males aren’t inherently dominant, females aren’t always envious. There’s lots of female dominance.

Counting

2007-10-26T16:31:00.000-07:00

I found it very intriguing that counting is innate knowledge, at least in small numbers. In the reading, it talked about infants’ understanding of small numbers. There are many studies that have been done on children’s understanding of counting and numbers, including Starkey’s experiment with numerical abstraction. The thing that I found particularly interesting about these experiments, and the knowledge gained from them, is that children’s ability to count seems to coincide with the preoperational stage of development. In the text, they discuss cardinality, and suggest that children grasp understanding of larger numbers as they age, which makes sense. The older they get, the more experience they have with numbers, and the more opportunities they have to assimilate knew information into their old schemas for counting.

The rules that children observe for counting are very interesting also, because it shows how much complexity there is to human thinking. I’m sure that most adults have never considered how they go about the counting concept, but we are able to determine, through observing children, how proficiency is gained in counting, and how much of it we are born with, and how much is gained through experience.

One thing that I did not understand from the text was how it could be useful that a child can use an incorrect counting system (1, 3, 6, etc.), though I did find it interesting that they would consistently use that system. I also wonder how they could come up with such an incorrect counting system that still incorporated numbers. What is it that keeps them from using letters or colors or shapes or other unspecified sounds to count? Is that something that is innate, or learned through hearing others count?

Another particularly interesting concept is that children can understand simple arithmetic as early as five months old. The thing that sparks my interest is that they have a basic understanding of the concept so early, but cannot explain their understanding much later in life, and often have trouble replicating it, for example on math tests in early school years.

It does seem like useful knowledge for a child to have, and perhaps there is an evolutionary explanation for why children are able to grasp only small numbers. Perhaps it has to do with being able to maintain a count of your family unit. I would assume that in the days of early humanity, family units were not very big, because excess numbers of children could not be provided for. This may cause infants to develop familiarity with just a few people early in their lives, and this leads to their basic understanding of the concept of numbers. I, of course, don’t really know how this came about, but I like to speculate about things like that. The comparison between the aboriginal children and the schooled children of Australia provided some interesting evolutionary understanding of spatial understanding, and perhaps could have been expanded to include basic number tasks as well. It has been mentioned that uneducated people in other countries are capable of doing math and taking measurements, but they often live in caste systems, or other types of systems where professions are handed down through families, and perhaps an informal education of mathematics occurs from generation to generation, in order to make each person’s job that much easier. Regardless, it is good to know that our concept of numbers isn’t completely socialized, but that experiences lead to further understanding and expansion of basic knowledge.

And on a completely different topic, I also was under the impression that both doors on a racecar are traveling at the same speed. I’m glad I was able to learn something about myself from the text as well. :-)

Second language and critical period

2007-10-26T16:24:00.000-07:00

The study by Johnson and Newport (1989) had suggested that people who learn a second language is better when they learn it before the critical age 7. As an international student, my comment to their study is “tell me about it”. I strongly agree that it is better to start learning a second language as early as possible. Take myself as an example. I came to United States when I was 19 years old. Although I have been studying English since I was 11, I still cannot speak English as fluently as native speaker do. On the other hand, my friends who came here before the age of 17 could always speak more fluently than I do. As Johnson and Newport suggested, maturational state might be one of the factors to learn a second language proficiently. However, I suggest that external environment and self- motivation might affect the level of proficiency of a second language in the study by Johnson and Newport(1989).

Clearly, it is undeniable that people who learn a second language in young age have better foundation, such as pronunciation, accent, and grammar, than others who learn a second language later in life. Yet, it is necessary to consider the social lives of participants in the study by Johnson and Newport (1989), because the social network of a participant might influence his or her proficiency of a second language in later life. For example, one of my American friends learned both Japanese and Chinese very well because not only he went to study abroad in Japan and China but also due to the fact that most of his friends from college are Japanese and Chinese. It is the effort he made to be surrounded in an environment that he can practice foreign languages as much as possible that made him achieved a high level of fluency in foreign language. Similarly, regardless of age differences, the participants in the study by John and Newport(1989) would have better performance in studying English as second language if their friends are mostly native-speakers. So, our social networks would have strong influence on the proficiency of acquiring a second language even though we already passed the critical period.

Nevertheless, the participants who started learning English as a second language in young age in the study by Johnson and Newport (1989) might have more friends who are native-speaker than the participants who started after age 17. First of all, the participants who came to the United States before age 7 could blend into the culture and society in the United States better than their parents because they do not have strong influence from their own cultures as their parents do. On the other hand, the adults might feel more comfortable to hang out with people who share with the same cultural background. Thus, adults might have more friends with same culture and language background even if they have stayed in the United States for several years already. As a result, it is easier for the participants who came to the U.S in their early-life than the participants who came after age 17 to be friends with native-speakers.

Furthermore, the goal of learning a second language might be different between children and adults. For the participants who came to the U.S after age 17, their main goal may be to obtain college degrees or to make a living. Thus, their priorities lie on learning sufficient English to cope with the language requirement of works and school. Unlike adults, children do not have time or work pressure. Therefore, the participants, who came to the U.S in young age, could focus on making friends with native-speakers and learning a second language without pressure.

In conclusion, age is one of determining factors for achieving fluency in a second language. In addition, it is almost impossible to have native level of pronunciation learning a language after puberty. However, effort and willingness to completely submerge in a culture and speak only the learning language can make a tremendous difference in fluency level regardless of age. Therefore, future study should investigate proficiency among people not only by age difference but also by external environment and self-motivation.

The advantages of a second language

2007-10-26T15:57:00.001-07:00

There are several advantages to knowing and learning a second language throughout your life. Research has shown that the best time to learn a second language is before you hit puberty. At this time in your life your brain is more adapt to learn and process more things. With more research being done to prove this, it is in our best efforts to start a dual language learning system. One of the earlier researchers on this topic was Lenneberg.

Lenneberg theorize that there was a critical period in an individual’s life that they could learn a second language. Lenneberg hypotheses were that the critical age for learning the second language was between early infancies and puberty. Lenneberg theory was based off of two points. The first point was that the evidence to date only showed strong learning in children before they reached puberty. His second point came from the theory that your brain matured at puberty. The maturation of the brain loses its ability for “the plasticity and reorganization capacities necessary fro acquiring language” (Johnson & Newport p. 62). Lenneberg studied native Korean or Chinese speakers that arrived in the United States at various ages. Lenneberg studied the proficiency of the English that these individuals acquired as their second language. His finding showed that the participants that began learning English at an earlier age showed a better proficiency compared to the participants that learned English at a later stage in life.

Lenneberg theory stated that learning a second language was easier during infancy and puberty. One reason for this is that your environment helps shape your learning. During the years that Lenneberg suggested for optimal amount of learning would be considered your leaning years. At this stage in your life, all you are doing is going to school to learn and experiencing new things. If the learning can start early in life and begin in the home, then the child will have an advantage in school. An example of this concept is a friend of mine that spoke French to his wife for an hour each day in front of his children. During this time the parents would allow the children to play among themselves while they carried on conversations. The conversations continued until they began teaching their children French. The results of the children put them ahead of their peers when they entered school.

The children of my friend will more likely have multiple advantages in life in addition to the head start they had in school. One advantage is the global possibility that comes with a second language. It is becoming more common for languages other than English to be spoken in urban America. The skill of a second language will also help children when they reach adulthood. The second language will propel them into an international job. At the minimum, the second language will help them in school where foreign language is needed for most degrees.

Our society is beginning to revolve around a two language environment. The known benefits of learning a second language heavily outweigh the disadvantages of not learning the second language. This raises the question of why a second language is not taught in grade school. The exercise hypothesis states that if you don’t use it, than you will lose it. The foundation that my friend gave his children can easily be lost if the education system doesn’t begin teaching foreign language at an earlier age.

What about cognitive development for children with disabilities?

2007-10-26T15:57:00.000-07:00

In class we talked about NSL, the Nicaraguan Sign Language or also called in Spanish, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN). This new sign language is different and unique, which was created by young deaf children who grasped their own concepts from their community and translated into pidgin home like forms and gestures. Although NSL was created only for young children, there was some adult intervention in shaping young deaf children's basic word concepts and meanings. Now a more challenging task is to help and show concepts and word meanings to deaf-blind children. Here we can recreate a story of how a child might develop concepts. " The story goes like this: Four blind men touch an elephant. The one who touches the trunk says, “An elephant is like a thick wiggling vine.” The one who touches an ear says, “No, an elephant is like a big leathery fan.” The one who touches the body says, “No! An elephant is like a big brick wall!” And the one who touches the tail says, “How could you all be so wrong?! An elephant is like a hanging, swaying rope!”(Miles and McLetchie. 2004, p 1). These two author gives us an introduction of concept development and how important is to not only direct these kids with concepts, but to enter into a relationship with them and try to understand their concepts and their world. This is important because based on how we perceive concepts we perceive our world; therefore in creating a more useful and meaningful way to redirect these children to acquire concepts, the more useful skills they will get.
The authors also make a remark on how important positive relationships are for heightening a child self-concepts and social concepts. For a child who has these disabilities takes longer time to get concepts right about their own environment. Then it is important to be aware about our own unconscious reactions and criticism and or negative remarks. Some of the techniques they suggest are to show tactual close up of things and describe them accurately, demonstrate actions before asking the child to do, document children concepts, how they understand this concepts and how the way they express themselves, so it could be useful to other kids.

As adults we transmit the knowledge of language, concepts and communications and these kids needs even more guidance and patience in assessing them with any need they want. There are places where they attend, but every single person they get in touch with are person who would lead them to get more sense about themselves and their own word. Be mindful and thoughtful in what we consciously or unconsciously redirect children in gaining language, self concept and meaning in their world.

Baby-Media Products versus Social Interaction

2007-10-26T15:32:00.000-07:00

Baby-media products business is growing rapidly, with companies that produce videos such as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius, and Brainy Baby earning millions of dollars annually. Such companies claim that they provide parents with tools that would boost up babies’ cognitive development, including language acquisition. They assert babies can acquire a broader vocabulary by passively watching their videos. However, research on the effects of social interaction is challenging these marketing claims by demonstrating both the contribution of social cues and the effects of lack of social interaction on language acquisition.
Social cues contribute to language acquisition by providing infants an interactive learning environment for mapping words to meanings. According to Baldwin (1991, 1993), infants as young as 16 to 19 months use nonverbal cues to label objects by the means of joint reference. They also use their understandings of other people’s intentions to label words (Tomasello & Barton, 1994). They associate a word with an action only if the action is performed intentionally, and avoid such association if a word is uttered accidentally during a novel action. By looking at a screen and listening to matching voices instead of social interaction, infants are deprived of such joint visual attention and communicative intentions.
The effects of such lack of social interaction in language acquisition are demonstrated by a study which compared live social interaction with televised foreign-language material (Kuhl, 2003). In this study, a group of nine-month-old infants, whose native language is English, listened to native speakers of Mandarin as the speakers read the infants books or interacted with them by showing toys. Another group of infants either saw the same speakers on a television screen or heard them over loudspeakers. Then, the infants were tested with a Mandarin phonetic contrast that does not occur in English. The infants who interacted with Mandarin speakers performed on phonetic tests better than both the control group which was not exposed to any Mandarin, and the auditory and visual exposure groups. This study suggests that regardless of which language the infants are being exposed to, language acquisition is enhanced by social interaction.
It is not only the presence of social interaction, but also its quality that affects language acquisition. To demonstrate this, Tomasello and Ferrar (1986) compared vocabularies of infants between 12 to 18 months whose mothers tend to label more or fewer objects. This study revealed that mothers who labeled fewer objects also followed their infants’ interest instead of redirecting it and such an interaction appeared to benefit the infants. Their infants performed better on language tasks than infants of mothers who labeled more things and did not follow their infants, interests. As suggested by this study, infants acquire language better through opportunities of social interaction in which they play an active part.
Infants are not recording machines. They play an active role in their own learning experience both by observing and interacting with other human beings. Companies that sell baby videos appear to ignore this active nature of language acquisition; they treat babies as passive agencies that emit information regardless of the source. They tend to ignore that their two-dimensional products cannot follow an infant’s gaze or show facial expressions in sync with the baby. As supported by infant research, current baby-media products cannot replace the social interaction infants need to prosper in language acquisition.

18 Month Old Vocab Explosion

2007-10-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

In class the other day we were talking about how children learn words slowly and then have an explosion in there vocabulary. But I was very curious as to how and why children experience a vocabulary explosion around 18 months of age. In an article on ScienceDaily there was an article on just this topic. Professor Bob McMurray at the University of Iowa found that it is not a complex explanation for this phenomenon but is rather simple. He said that “The field of developmental psychology and language development has always assumed that something happens at that point to account for this word spurt: kids discover things have names, they switch to using more efficient mechanisms and they use their first words to help discover new ones.” He says that simply by repeating words over time along with varying the difficulty of the words and the fact that children are learning multiple words at once all account for this dramatic increase in vocabulary. “Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold,” McMurray said. “They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if those two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion.” As long as there are more difficult words than easy ones, the vocabulary explosion is guaranteed. But since there are few words in any language that are used an overwhelming number of times in ordinary speech the frequency of use is considered as a measure of degree of difficulty, and thus showing that languages have many more difficult words than easy ones according to McMurray.

I found this article to be very interesting about the explosion of vocabulary. I also thought that it was interesting in class when we were talking about when parents orient to their children’s gaze and then tell them the word that they will understand it better than if the parent just shows them an object and tells them the name of it. It makes sense that this would happen because the child would already be interested in the object and wants to learn more about it. I also think that reading at least one book to your child every day, encouraging the child to repeat short sentences, and reading rhymes with interesting sounds, especially those accompanied by actions or pictures would also increase the vocabulary for the child. It is just amazing to me the whole developmental process and how language is acquired.

Patterns in Frequency and Pitch

2007-10-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

I especially appreciated the article “Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants” by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport. It was interesting to read more evidence that what infants are first hearing and discerning are patterns in speech. This makes sense to me because this is a standard method of decryption or understanding and categorizing a new and unfamiliar observation. An infant has to learn to identify separate words, and has to figure out how to assign meaning to the words once they are identified.

I also found it very interesting that infants could identify differences between a string of nonsense words, and the same string with some errors. The infants are recognizing familiar patterns, and learning to separate those out from the rest of the unfamiliar sounds. The article also mentions that infants use the pattern of sounds (as in the phrase “pretty#baby”) to identify where one word ends and another starts.

A similar concept and learning tool that has been discussed in many of my psych classes is motherese (Infant Directed Talk). This form of speaking is slower and does tend to use smaller words, but I think the most significant and helpful aspect is the “sing-song”-like nature of the speech. A previous class showed a video from a study involving mothers from different cultures and languages. The mothers were recorded while talking with their infant. There were four basic types of communication found: soothing, attention-getting, cautioning/saying no, and I think the fourth was questioning, but I cannot recall.

What fascinated me about this study was that when the pitch of the mother’s voice was analyzed, the same pattern was found to apply to the same meaning of the speech, regardless of the language (unfortunately, I cannot recall the specific study). Other studies have indicated that infants pay more attention to IDT as opposed to normal adult-directed speech, and that they understand more when listening to IDT (again, I don’t remember the name or authors of the study).

This information suggests to me that tone and pitch is another way infants analyze patterns in language when they are learning to understand the sounds around them.

My View on the Unique Process of Language Development

2007-10-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Language has been proven to be a highly unique form of learning within human beings. However, it is necessary to question if language is indeed a special form of learning in comparison to all other forms of cognitive development. It is also necessary to determine which view on language development stands to be the most universally accepted and appropriate. Chomsky’s theory, people possess a "language organ," seems a bit unrealistic. Personally, before even reading Chomsky’s theory in depth, I questioned why he coined the term language organ to describe how the rapid learning process of language occurs, the title doesn’t seem cognitively appropriate. However, he does have points which bring resolution to the topic in question. His concept surrounds the idea that language is too complex and inconsistent for infants to develop it so quickly. This organ holds the innate knowledge of aspects of grammar that apply universally, and allow infants to learn their particular native language quickly. Conversely, it seems his term of "universal grammar" is a variable concept unable to be definitively explained by psychologists. While Chomsky’s theory gave an answer to the question into how language development occurs at the rate it does, it also displays a very narrow view into the reasons behind why language development occurs, a strictly nativist view.
I feel we must consider all ends of the spectrum when it comes to a concept so deeply complex as language acquisition development. I am more accepting of a connectionist view which embodies a multitude of language learning. Yes, I believe there is some innate and universal nature to an infants’ rapid development of their native language. However, I am in firm belief that not only does this form of learning hold innate properties, but it also must require social presence for this ability to develop at the rate it does. It must stem from and be influenced by both a behavioral and native basis. Without infant’s exposure to the adult language occurring around them, they would not have the ability to develop language. A child must be exposed to aspects of grammar before he/she can reiterate forms of language. However, there must also be something stemming from our six million years of evolution as humans that has produced teh ability to desire communication. Language development is indefinitely one of the most unique forms of cognitive development. It should not be limited to one view explaining why it is so indefinitely unique and extensive.

Children and language

2007-10-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

Learning about language over the past week has been a great experience and very helpful as well. I am currently in an internship where I help with early intervention with 2 years. It is nice to be able to apply the stages of language to the stage they are in developmentally. For instance seeing the conversational babbling and knowing that they are learning up to 9 new words a day is absolutely amazing. I have been trying to watch to see if I could notice just by looking if they show any left symmetry when they speak. This can be at times difficult because they are always moving. But after reading the article titled “Left Hemisphere Cerebral Specialization for Babies while Babbling” I found it much easier to understand what the different movements of their mouth mean. And I know that at this age it is already well established that they are not just moving their mouth for motor skills but because they really are trying to talk. However it is still neat to see when they smile its slightly more to the right and when they babble or even say actual words that it is predominately on the left side of their mouth.

With that being said I was trying to apply this concept to the one we discussed about children being able to rebound easier from a stroke or injury to their left hemisphere. How is it then if at 5 months that they are already showing signs that their brain has already assigned a certain area for language that they are able to still compensate for the injury? For example the little girl that was rescued at the age of 6 and was still able to sort of go on and make sentences. Was this possible because she was able to babble even if she wasn’t getting the social interactions that she needed or is it just a completely unrelated topic? Is It possible that someone who has no social interaction will still develop their left hemisphere for language? Is it innate or learned? Obviously the social and physiological tie into one another because without someone to guide us as children through the stages of development we will probably be stunted in some way. I also recently read somewhere that children who are born premature will not develop at the same rate as another child who is also 18 months old but was carried to full term. They said this was because depending on how premature the baby was they are actually that far behind. I will have to find the place I read this and site it later. I just thought it was an interesting idea.

Another interesting thing that I learned in class was about in class is that when teaching children words to go along with what the word is associated to it is important to tell them the words of what they are looking at instead of calling their attention away to show them what we are looking at. I am working on this with the two year old to see how much they can learn just by doing this with them instead of making them look at something they are not interested in. Then also rewarding them with praise when they get something correct. It is nice to see the children progress and I can’t wait to see how everything goes over the next couple of months. Not only do I get to help these children develop their language skills but also their social skills, which I have found can be important in teaching language. Teaching them how to speak correctly in order to express their frustrations, happiness, and needs so that other children and adults can understand what it is that they are need.

Second Language Aquistion and the maturational state hypothesis

2007-10-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

I found this topic to be extremely interesting mainly because one of my best friends has experienced the development of several languages over the course of her life. Her first language and the one that she speaks at home with her family is Farsi (the language spoken in Iran). When she was two she was relocated to Italy where she learned to speak Italian almost fluently, later when she was about seven her family again moved to the United States where she learned to speak English. This is the language that she speaks most because she had been in this country since then and uses it on a day to day basis. She then learned Spanish in college. Although she speaks English extremely well and most people would think that it was her first language, she still has some interesting grammatical mistakes which I find to be fascinating. What I also find to be fascinating about her story is the fact that English is the only language which she can read and write fluently (she does fairly well with Spanish however this is a newly acquired language). She also no longer remembers how to speak or understand Italian.
After reading the Johnson and Newport article on critical periods of language acquisition I felt that the maturational state hypothesis seemed to be more supported by this particular case study. I feel that the fact that she was able to learn so many completely new languages in such a short span of her life shows the ability of children to adapt their language to the environment in which they are in. Her brother who is only four years older than she, never learned Italian and still has a very thick accent. I find this to show that children really do have a critical period in which they are able to learn language, and learn it with ease. I felt that the exercise theory would be hard to prove because of the fact that so much research has shown that adults have a harder time learning a new language, even if they live in a new country. My friend's parents for example still are not very comfortable speaking English and they have been in this country for a very long time, and know English. I relate it to when I was learning to speak Spanish and even though I could understand what was being said I still was not comfortable converstating.
I feel that this critical period could be used to better improve the way in which ESL students are treated in schools. My friend had a very difficult time adjusting when she first came to this country and I feel that part of it had to do with the insensitivity of our school systems when it comes to non native English speakers.

Spanglish

2007-10-26T12:15:00.001-07:00

Out of pure coincidence I got into a discussion this week about how our country should deal with Spanish speakers in areas like southern California. The stance I took was that we should make efforts to teach the incoming Hispanic population English, but that we should not make changes that make it difficult for some one from another region in America to manage. My girlfriends stance was a lot more humanitarian, claiming that there a necessary part of our agriculture industry, which aught to make their native language a priority as well. I still hold my views, mainly because I believe that while this is thoughtful in the short-run, it does nothing to encourage emigrants to learn English, or teach it to their children. There is a division in those areas, and while it is due to a whole lot of things, it’s probably safe to say that a majority of these are caused by not being able to communicate.
I still hold all of my opinions the core of which that English should be maintained as our countries dominant language in all of its regions, but I’ll admit that the way to do this isn’t to make managing without it impossible. I have my own experience learning a language and I really don’t think that without being immersed in it I would have any chance, and even then I would be marginal at best. So I can’t honestly say that Mexican adults can be expected to master English. It also can’t really be expected that they don’t speak to their children for fear of passing along Spanish. Spanish is obviously going to be the first language for a majority of second-generation Mexican-Americans. It’s not until the third generation that it can be reasonably expected that English will be the child’s first language. When someone mentioned Spanglish the other day it made me curious why it’s not considered a pidgin language. I don’t know too much about the Hawaii case but it doesn’t seem to me that the situations are all that different. There are two groups that speak different languages that need to be able to understand each other. Maybe pidgin languages also require an isolation factor, like an island or secluded area, so that there is not an established language being used. It will be interesting to see if the best thing to do is nothing, and allow the generations to work this out.

Language

2007-10-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

This week has been spent discussing how children learn language. This is a particularly interesting topic for me. I have always wondered how we acquire what we know about language. Are we destined to learn language? We have focused on several viewpoints, including the nativist, behvaiorist, and new approaches that find a compromise between the two. I believe that a compromise between the two views appears most accurate when examining language. It wouldn’t make sense thinking that language was only part of nature because that view completely denies the large role language plays as a social construct. While I do believe that certain aspects of language are inherent and innate, there are other parts that are learned through culture and experiences within one’s environment. When learning new words or how to use those words children look to their parents to provide them with the proper social cues utilizing their ability to social reference. The study by Baldwin found that when mentioning a new word that children haven’t heard before they follow the gaze of the person who is talking. This suggests that children use their parents as a referencing tool and know that whatever a person is talking about they are most likely looking at it as well.

I found all of the information this week particularly interesting because I can directly apply it to my life. My friend has daughter who recently turned two and she doesn’t talk much, in fact she rarely talks at all. She knows single words, but hasn’t reached that point in which she strings at least two of them together. Her favorite words happen to be stop, no, open, and push. We are currently trying to teach her to use her words instead of pointing, while trying to teach her words for other objects. She appears to understand what we are saying when we ask her to do something, but for some reason she just won’t use her words. Something I took from last lecture that I think will greatly help my friend in his quest is to use follow in labeling, as well as making sure that whatever he is referring to he should be looking at.

I have a question about the Nicaraguan sign language. It was stated that it started out as home signs that the children developed themselves within their homes to help them communicate with their family. However, I would think that these home signs weren’t simply of the child’s construct. Wouldn’t the parents and those around them have played a role in their child’s home signs? Those around the children would have to know what they meant when certain signs were used so possibly they aided in creating those signs. And if this was the case than the pidgin becoming a creole was influenced by social factors.

The Critical Period Regarding Language Acquisition

2007-10-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

While sitting thru lecture this past Wednesday I kept having flashbacks to a class I took about a year ago. It was a language acquisition class and we were discussing the "critical period" of developing language. Up to that point in my life I had never really put any thought into such a notion but it sounded like a good idea. One thing jumped into my head, that was my nephew Jalen and how quickly he picked up words growing up. Thinking about him and comparing that to myself trying to learn Spanish helped me to wrap my head around the concept.

Spending time with my nephew growing up gave me a little insight to how quickly children develop the ability to learn new words. I would go over to see him and anything new that he saw would cause him to point and say, "wha dat?" he wouldn't even think about saying the word but he would point at the same thing over and over again. By the time I would leave he would have driven a couple of words into his head and mine, I remember the first time he did this I couldn't stop thinking about frogs (that was his discovery of the afternoon). Sure enough, the next time I went over Jalen pointed at the frog on his chair and uttered the word to me with a reassured smile on his face, then he pointed at the turtle and said, "wah dat?"

That story doesn't mean much but it unlocked something for me with regards to children and language. They go about their business one word at a time. Learning words like ball, cat, momma, and more. Eventually they build up enough they start to put together combinations and small simple sentences. Learning the grammatical rules as they go, making mistakes and correcting them eventually. All this happens during what we now call the "critical period" of language acquisition (pre puberty).

Why is the critical period important? Well, basically this is when the brain is in the entry mode of it's existence, it's all geared up for sucking in information. Our text book for class says that the average 1st grader understands 10,000 words and a 5th grader knows 40,000, break that down the the book says between 1.5 and 10 years of age you average 10 words per day.

So we all know that kids pick up language pretty quick, how about an 18 year old kid trying to learn Spanish at a community college. The first day of class (Monday) we were handed a sheet with 50 Spanish words on it, and told the quiz was Friday. If the average child can pull out 10 new words per day I should have been able to learn 50 words in 5 days. Wrong, I failed that quiz, and the class only got harder.

We really didn't spend much time learning to label the environment around us. Sure we learned what desk was and so on, but I didn't have the chance to point at something over and again like Jalen did. All the cue cards in the world don't add up to real experience like children get. Very quickly we moved onto grammatical rules, and simple phrases. The strangest thing about adults learning language is the fact that we don't really do it word by word. We do it with phrases you might use. If you were to ask me how to say library in Spanish I've got to think about it for a second, but if you ask me to utter the phrase, "Where is the library?" I can instantly say , "Donde es la biblioteca?" (if that's wrong I'm a bit rusty, but you get the idea).

My brain isn't prepared to learn a new language right now, I'm past that critical period in development. I will recommend one thing to my brother, that being Jalen needs to take a foreign language as soon as it's offered. Hopefully he won't wait till college and kill his GPA like I did for a couple of terms. People always say, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" their wrong, you can, but when it comes to language; it's just gets a lot harder once you're out of that critical period.

Blog number 2

2007-10-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

Something that I have found really interesting in this and other cognitive based classes, is different types of cognitive errors. How people, from infancy to adulthood, make consistent, predictable errors. Some of these errors make sense, and some adult errors you can see primitive versions of in infancy. I think that is fascinating. For example, the paper by Feigenson, Carey and Hauser about infant’s representations or more, I think really shows an elementary version of range of difficulty in adult representation of more. I am referring mostly to the fact that infants have an understanding that 2 is more than 1 and 3 is more than 2, but have trouble differentiating larger numbers, even with the same ratio and even after they accounted for other possible interactions, like motivation. I think that adults show a much more advanced version of this difficulty distinguishing differences, the more items there are, though I would guess adults would do better with ratios than infants do. It is just interesting to look at the evolution of perception, and how some things seem innate, and some things that intuitively seem simple can be more challenging than one might think, brain wiring plays a bigger role than I think people realize. This reminds me a lot of things I learned in cognition, for example, how people miss-judg steepness of a hill, especially when they think they are going to have to walk up it…I know that this is different, but I just find cognitive misjudgment to be really interesting.
Something else I have always found really interesting, that we have touched on a few times in class is brain plasticity. The brains abilities are incredible to me. To me, the best demonstration of this is how the brain processes language. First of all language is obviously extremely important evolutionarily speaking. Communication is vital to existence. So, it makes sense that the brain would spread out different components of language throughout the brain. The obvious example, seen in most psych classes, is Broca’s area versus Wernicke’s area. Broca’s area, is responsible for word production and Wernicke’s area, is responsible for language comprehension. This spreading out is important because, if there is a stroke in one area the other areas of communication may still be intact. And plasticity comes into play if that stroke is in younger kids, who can that use their more plastic brain’s to delegate space differently and possibly recover some abilities that the more cemented adult brain can’t.
This leads into the idea of a critical period. This is something that I have always found really interesting. I have wondered before why, if learning a first language is so smooth and intuitive, is it so hard to learn a second language? Admittedly, I always did really badly in second language classes, but I still wondered why it was so different. Obviously the process of learning a second language is very different because you are typically not emerged in it the same as when you learn a first language, but even when you do, if you learn a second language late, you never have the same connection to it. My best friends mom is a good example of this. She speaks only English, none of her kids know her native language and she has lived in an English speaking country most of her life, but she still speaks broken English, and holds on the grammatical and syntactical rules of her first language. And, people from the who share her first language, will make the same errors. I think this is even true for sounds, which is also really interesting, and happens really young. We loose the ability to differentiate between phonemes that don’t exist in our language, but seem completely different to people who natively speaks languages where they do exist. In class the other day we couldn’t even pick out an individual word spoken in a different language. It is incredible to me how our brain molds to our environment and looses certain things, like culturally irrelevant phonemes, probably in order for the rest of the brain to run more efficiently. And we completely loose these things. We cannot completely learn a language past a certain critical period (probably), and we will never really understand those different phonemes the way speakers of other languages do.

Crackers and Buttons.

2007-10-26T10:41:00.000-07:00

In class, we watched a video of a four- or five-year-old child sitting opposite an experimenter, each with a graham cracker in front of them. The experimenter asks if they have shared the crackers equally, and the child nods. The experimenter then breaks her own cracker in half, and then asks the child again if they have shared the crackers equally. The child shakes her head, because now she perceives the experimenter as having two crackers, and she only having one – thus, the experimenter has “more”.

In our assigned reading about the experiments done by Feigenson, Carey and Hauser (2002), we read that 10- and 12-month-old infants who were given the choice between one large cracker versus two smaller ones (that added up to less than the bigger cracker), they preferred the large cracker. When given the choice between one cracker and two halves of a cracker the same size, they chose at chance. Thus, it appeared that they perceived “more” to be a function of the total surface area of the crackers, and not the number of crackers.

What does this mean? Why do 10- and 12-month-old infants seem to be able to represent the abstract quantity of surface area better than four- and five-year-olds? Would infants then be able to succeed at conservation tasks that much older children consistently fail to do? If so, why and how do they lose this ability?

The findings of Feigenson, Carey and Hauser (2002) suggest that babies can compare object files on the basis of continuous extent. It’s not as if they don’t have the ability to compare object files on the basis of one-to-one correspondence – there have been numerous other experiments that prove they can. Babies simply preferred to use the basis of continuous extent. It is not unconceivable, therefore, that this ability to compare abstract quantities is an innate ability, along with the other counting principles that Gelman and Gellistel (1978) suggested.

In my opinion, one strong possibility for the apparent “loss” of this ability in preoperational children is perceptual narrowing. We have learnt that neuronal connections that aren’t exercised weaken and wither away, resulting in a decrease of perceptual ability. Connections that are used frequently, on the other hand, are strengthened. As children develop their cognitive abilities, one of the first things parents teach their children is how to count. Very rarely do parents put crackers in front of their children and say, “Cracker A is bigger than Cracker B, therefore there is more of Cracker A”, or “I have two crackers and you have one, but the total area of my two crackers is smaller than the area of your cracker, so you have more.” It is much more likely that parents would just go, “I have one cracker, and you have one… We both have a cracker each!”, or “I have one cracker, and you have one… two… TWO crackers!”. Thus, the counting principles are emphasized and exercised, whereas the more abstract quantitative analysis is often ignored when both bases are present.

It is interesting to note, however, that this preference for the continuous extent basis for comparison does not completely disappear for preoperational children. Consider the child in the same video we watched, who was given two rows of five buttons and then asked if one row had more buttons than the other. She counted them both out and confidently announced that they were both the same, because there were five buttons in each. The experimenter then spread the buttons in one row out, so that it appeared longer, and then asked the child if one row had more buttons than the other. The child, who had just counted out the buttons, now said that the longer row had more buttons, thus displaying a preference for the continuous extent basis over the one-to-one correspondence.

Is this phenomenon is another instance of U-shaped development, in which the capabilities of performing a particular task first decrease, and then increase with age? Is this capability for abstract quantitative comparison in infants limited to surface area? We know that preoperational children often fail at conservation tasks, and that the majority of concrete operational children succeed. It would be interesting to design and conduct conservation tasks for sensorimotor infants to see if the hypotheses mentioned above hold any truth.

critical period

2007-10-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

Through extensive research, there has been strong evidence for the hypothesis of a critical period for the acquisition of language, and that this is not an all or nothing phenomena. In the article by Johnson and Newport (1989), they assessed the age of acquisition of a second language by examining Chinese and Korean immigrants, and separated them into age specific categories. This allowed them to examine their hypothesis that second language acquisition follows the same critical period as first language acquisition. They concluded that second language learners exposed to the second language by age 7 could acquire the second language with the same proficiency as native speakers of that language. They also demonstrated that there is a asymptotic digression of proficiency for second language as a function of age of exposure. Similar findings been replicated in American Sign Language (ASL) learners, since there is a large age range when deaf people acquire ASL as their first language. In many exhaustive studies of language acquisition by Helen Neville and colleagues, she has demonstrated ERP evidence that supports Johnson and Newport's findings of second language acquisition. With all of the evidence supporting a critical period for language acquisition, what factors in development determine the deficits in language proficiency after the critical period? Is there a biological neural correlate or environmental factors that inhibit the ability to fully understand what causes the deficits in language learning? Referenced in Johnson and Newport's article is the study by Hubel and Weisel of ocular dominance column formation in the visual cortex, and the critical period for its development. In their experiments they showed that dominance columns form within a specific time period, ONLY of there is asymmetric input to the visual cortex, but if the cats were raised in a dark environment (eyes sutured shut from birth) that the critical period could be delayed long after the normal time window, with normal vision developing after opening the eyes. This adjustment of the critical period hasn't been shown in the development of language. So what determines the deficits shown in language mastery in late learning of language? Combining evidence from other studies, and studies of different cognitive modalities, it appears that there is some genetic neural basis for a language critical period. Genie, a girl confined for her early life, with minimal human contact and minimal language exposure, showed severe deficits in language proficiencies. She was able to acquire new words after rescue, but with severe syntactic deficits. Since visual information reaches the V1 region, and is then sent to other areas of the brain, it is essentially a more simple system than the many systems involved in language comprehension, and production. Should we assume that there is an absolute critical window for language that is a result of neural changes globally in the brain that are involved with language acquisition, or only certain regions involved in language abilities. I feel that the latter is a better hypothesis. For instance, Genie is able to produce words without impediment, and can link words into a meaningful statement, but she is unable to link the words together in a tense specific, grammatically correct manner. This leads me to conclude that the cortical region(s) involved in syntax, are primarily linked to a critical period. This is evident in Johnson and Newport's findings as well. I have personal anecdotal evidence that supports this hypothesis. In grade school, we studied basic Spanish words (i.e. counting, greeting, basic vocabulary), but did not study any of the semantics of the language. In high school, I learned many more words easily, and studied without becoming proficient, the syntactic components of Spanish. I still have a large Spanish vocabulary, but like Genie, I make gross syntactic errors.

This research has a strong social/environmental component that is not being addressed. Are adults living in a community that uses their non-native language, that are attempting to acquire the language, are being inhibited through stereotyping and overt discrimination? Is the language barrier between them and those who they interact with to gain exposure to the second language resulting in avoidance of communicating, thus they receive less exposure than children who generally don't have as much exposure to stereotypes, and prejudice? Johnson and Newport attempted to determine if self-consciousness was a factor in their learning. After reviewing the methods of their research, there may be a cultural confound in their research, because the questioning doesn't appear to be in terms that would be culturally accurate for native Asians. It would be advantageous to conduct an assessment of this with the assistance of a culture expert to develop culturally significant questions to see what role stereotype/prejudice plays in second language development in adults.

Potentiality or Innateness?

2007-10-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

Noam Chomsky suggested that humans are born with a “language organ” that incorporates an innate mechanism for comprehension of certain characteristics of grammar. He maintains that intrinsic “universal grammar” knowledge allows children to recognize which type of grammar is used by their native language. Without this system, Noam claims, children could not learn language as quickly and as easily as they do.

Many researchers, while agreeing that language learning is special, disagree with the notion that a special “organ” exists for language. MacWhinney asserts that language learning is special, and that varieties of aspects including neural, cognitive, and social factors play a role. I tend to agree with MacWhinney’s theory.

I believe that labeling language as innate is underestimating the social factors that are key to one’s language acquisition. I am more inclined to believe that the potential to learn language is innate. The word “innate” conveys to us that something is present at birth and initiated from the intellect rather than from experience. A child will not acquire language without experience. Breathing, crying, and sucking are but a few of the innate abilities that infants come into the world with, language is not.

Among the reasons for my dissent from the innate theory is the evidence of plasticity. If language was innate and a special organ or area were required in order for one to procure language then if that area of the brain were damaged language could not be learned. That, however, is not always the case. The research indicates that if impairment occurs in the area of a developing brain (before one year old) that is ideal for language, other parts of the brain, usually the right hemisphere will pick up the language. This in my mind negates the Chomsky theory at the very least.

Another reason for my dissent is the fact that the quality of a child’s language, particularly grammar and vocabulary, seem to have much more to do with the child’s experience as opposed to the child’s intellect. If a child incorrectly uses me and her when she and I is appropriate, or exchanges seen for saw, or say I gots instead of I have, and no one corrects them they have no innate knowledge that informs them of their error, they simply continue speaking this way until someone corrects them.

I have children who are adopted. One child in particular came into our home at the age of fourteen. His vocabulary was inferior and he had little comprehension of the rules of grammar, in fact, he spoke as if English were his second language, saying things like beltseat instead of seatbelt. This made sense when we discovered that his family had never owned a car and he had little experience with seatbelts. Although research indicates a critical period, occurring prior to adolescence this child learned rapidly through experience and correction. Two years later, he speaks quite eloquently, using a variety of words and using them correctly. I believe that experiencing proper language and being corrected was critical for him, there did not appear to be any innate functioning or universal grammar mechanisms at work to help him establish a normal functional level of language.

Is language actually special?

2007-10-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

During the course of my sophomore year, I frequently sat through Organic Chemistry class and wondered if the teacher had accidentally begun to lecture in a different language. For long periods of time, I would not be able to recognize a single word he had said and could not follow along with the lecture. This is a feeling many students may have in a foreign language class when the teacher actually is speaking a different language. While reading Siegler and Alibali's chapter on Language Development, one continually encounters the notion that language acquisiton is "special." For up to a year, babies possess the ability to learn phonemes for any particular language. After this year, they still retain the ability to master other languages with great ease. At this stage of development, children have increased brain plasticity as compared with adults and still have large areas of the brain that are both underdeveloped and undecided in function.
What if Chemistry were considered a language? Yes, the phonemes are generally from the English language, but nonetheless, the conceptual basis for the subject is completely foreign to most individuals. Do children at an early age maintain the ability to obtain all different types of information, or are they limited specifically to language? Most parents do not find it beneficial to read an infant a book on Calculus because they feel it is irrelevant and beyond the child's comprehension. However, they do feel it is beneficial to read a child fairy-tales which are still completely outside the realm of a child's comprehension. Language is taught to children on a daily basis both directly and indirectly. If we were to continually teach our children science from the day they are born their understanding of the subject matter may progress just as well as their grammatical progression occurs. Is language really special or is it simply the most commonly reinforced learning objective? Chile prodigies may be the result of such early exposure to subject matter out of the normal real of what is taught to infants.
The opening paragraph of the book states that language is internally motivated and sites an example, "No one else was in the room during Anthony's monologue. Nonetheless, he found talking sufficiently enjoyable that he spoke anyway (183)." In this passage, language is not used from communication. Language is an amusement to the baby becuase he is able to produce sounds and words although they do not make linear sense. To imply a babies motivation from a strain of words seems somewhat exaggerated to me. The child may take pleasure in the fact that he is learning a language or may be happy to know he can create sounds from within his body regardless of any meaning or communication factor these sounds may entail. If written numbers were to replace words the way sign language often does, would there be the same response? Will children absorb any concept that begins reinforcement at birth or are they truly innately determined to learn language?

How do we learn language?

2007-10-26T03:14:00.001-07:00

As discussed in the previous class, humans already have the ability to map words to their meanings when we are just children, and this is actually a very important way of how we learn the language. This reminds me how I learned different words and their meanings throughout childhood and all the way even until now, both in Mandarin and English. Interestingly, what I have observed around me is that most people can map words with the correct meaning pretty well, so that no one would relate the word ‘dog’ with just a part of a dog but to the whole animal. I guess human’s ability and intelligent is really amazing. However, this also brings up the questions that how do people learn language when there was initially no language around? This also relates to the part in class that how a brand new language develops among deaf people; I guess this is the same as how people first come up with language.

Another question that I have is that: could some color blind patient is actually related with the wrong mapping of name of different colors? For example, if a child was taught that the color black is called ‘yellow’, wouldn’t the child believe that the color is actually yellow and be mistaken as a color blind person? As conclusion, I think that the process of learning language is really amazing.

Language abilities in infants

2007-10-26T02:24:00.000-07:00

After reading the articles about language in this set of articles I have attempted to understand the articles alone but also to understand ways in which they might connect. The first article “left hemisphere specialization…” conducted a study in which they observed the asymmetry of babies’ mouths while the babbled. The researchers determined that when babies babbled the right side of their mouth was opened wider suggesting that the left hemisphere was more active. When I read this I found that it was compelling, yet I was left with questions. One question that I was left with was if they considered doing brain imaging to determine exactly which areas of the brain were working, and if these were known language centers. The researchers believed that babbling was somehow an exercise in speech articulation. It seems as though this can relate to the research about second languages. Babbling does not necessarily sound like any sort of language. Perhaps babbling is just preparing babies to say a multitude of different words or even different languages. It would be interesting if research was done to examine if babies utilize different phones from different languages in their babbling or if they simply utilized sounds that they commonly heard. Perhaps children who are exposed to different phones from different languages would be able to articulate these better if they were able to have this exposure during the babbling phase. The “Critical periods…” paper maintains that there seems to be a critical period for second language acquisition, where it is easier for people to learn another language. I wonder if part of this critical period is the babbling phase in which babies are able to practice articulating different sounds that may not be part of the English language but another language. Perhaps another reason why babies are better at learning a second language at a young age has to do with “statistical learning” techniques that may be stronger or more prevalent in infants than adults, or that children may rely on more than adults. Perhaps due to perceptual narrowing this ability is somewhat compromised in adults. Children are able to use this technique to learn words in almost any language because there is consistency in the way words are formed in all kinds of languages. Perhaps as we get older we rely on our already existing word bank or specific combinations or rules for the ways in which words are formed and thus do not have to rely on this technique therefore it is somewhat lost. This “statistical learning” technique also seems to be highly related to mathematical abilities which suggests that perhaps babies innately have some mathematical abilities. It would be interesting to do imaging studies to determine the extent of these mathematical abilities in language comprehension. These different concepts are all really interesting when considering them in terms of one aspect of language but when you consider how they relate to each other you begin to see how language recognition, comprehension and production are related in interesting and complex ways. a

Learning a second language

2007-10-25T22:40:00.000-07:00

Learning a second language is not only difficult but can take a lot of time especially if the individual is older when learning the new language. Findings suggest that there is a critical age for developing a second language. Those that learn a language at a younger age usually do better than learning it at a later age. The critical age for developing a second language is 7. If a child learns a second language before the age of seven, they are able to speak it fluently just as well as native speakers.
Why is 7 the critical age? At seven the brain is still developing and forming while adults' brains are already well developed and biology does not permit people to acquire a language at a later age. Changes in brain funtioning account for the decline in language learning at later ages.

First language development has an impact on both second language development and on cognitive development. Piaget has shown that human cognitive development is achieved through maturation stages. He suggests that children can sustain socialized speech at a preoperational stage of development . At 6 or 7 children are able to begin considering others' points of view and include them in their conversation. Perhaps at 7 years old children are really able to understand the differences between their 1st language and 2nd language. Many children who do develop both languages fluently will learn the first language at home with their families, and will continue with their culture, while at school they learn the 2nd language as well as a new culture and a new set of beleifs. While children at younger ages, around 4 can not easily translate from one language to another at about 6 years when children finally reach the elemantary school years they are able to translate back and forth between the two languages.

Children's environment nurtures and shapes his or her ability to use language. Experiences at home and in other settings that the child is exposed to will determing their success in school as well as their communication skills, and school success.

Research suggest that children with bilingualism do not experience confusion. In earlier ages/ stages of the acquisition of a second language, they usually show being a little behind but it usually doensn't last very long. They are able to speak and express themselves just as well as native speakers.
Bilingual children show some advantages in socio-cognitive development when compared to children who only speak one language. They usually have a easier time understanding the beleifs of others, and can understand both cultures equally.

Learning a second language can have it's benefits but age is a crucial factor in language acquisition, the younger you learn it the better, but the critical age is seven.

Tea for Two

2007-10-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

My friend has a baby daughter, Jazmin, who is about 7 months old. While among a group of adults who were playing a version of peekaboo with her, she started intermittently shrieking with glee. But besides being amused by the game of peekaboo, Jazmin's expression suggested she was interested in the sounds she herself was making. Babbling is a form of play that allows infants to learn what sounds they can make, what pitches and tones they can create, how loud and soft they can go. However, I think its also important to note the social aspect of this example; Jazmin was also testing out different verbal responses within the context of physical interactions.

While this is a simple example, I think it is important to note just how important social interaction is to language development. This makes a great deal of sense because in a hard-to-imagine world without social interaction, communication language would be mostly unnecessary. The experience of feral children support this view to some extent; Genie, who had almost no social contact never fully developed language, while Isabella, who had some contact on a fairly regular basis with her blind mother, developed language fully.

In class, we discussed how visual social cues can help babies learn the meaning of words. By watching where the speaker is looking when they refer to something new, the baby can often infer the meaning of the new word. What about blind babies, though? While they have the ability to sense the language of their parents (unlike deaf babies of hearing parents), they may have a difficult time learning what many of these words refer to, since they cannot see where their parents are looking. What effect might this have on language acquisition?

The phenomenon of conversational babbling also supports an interactionist view, as infants imitate the rhythm and intonation of adult dialogue. Adults will often engage infants at this stage in mock conversations, where the child babbles, and the adult gives some verbal expression suggesting they understand (i.e. "You don't say!", "Really! That is so interesting.", etc.). Interestingly, intonation and rhythm are the first parts of language babies hear inside the womb. As adults, we often don't think about how important these elements are to communication, especially social relationships. And yet infants go through a stage of babbling that is all about emulating the "style" of conversation. Are babies trying to convey meaning at all or are they simply "practicing" these social elements of dialogue? Whichever is true, this form of babbling reflects the social nature of language.

Social interaction and language are so intertwined that it seems almost impossible to develop a test (at least, a morally sound one) that would determine if and how language could develop. The closest example seems to be that of feral children in comparison with children involved in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Feral children had little to no language exposure or social interaction, while deaf children in Nicaragua had social interaction, but no language exposure (to a language they could sense). The Nicaraguan children had "home signs", but once they were grouped with other deaf children without a language, they developed an entirely new language.