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Chapter 7 - Conceptual Development
Concepts are general ideas/understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar in some way.
Ex. objects can have similar shapes (all football fields are rectangular), materials (all diamonds are made of compressed carbon), sizes (all skyscrapers are tall), & tastes (all lemons are sour).
Concepts help us understand the world and act effectively in it by allowing us to generalize from prior experience (if we like the taste of one carrot, we’ll probably like the taste of others).
Concepts also tell us how to react emotionally to new experiences (fearing all dogs after being bitten by one).
Theme 1: Nature vs Nurture
Children’s concepts reflect the interaction between their experiences and their biological tendency to process info in particular ways.
Theme 2: Active Child
Many of children’s concepts reflect their active attempts to make sense of the world.
Theme 3: How Change Occurs
Researchers who study conceptual development try to understand not only the concepts children form but the processes of forming them as well.
Theme 4: Sociocultural Context
How the concepts we form are influenced by the society we live in.
Controversy: Nativists vs Empiricists
Nativists argue infants are born with some sense of fundamental concepts or with specialized learning mechanisms that allow them to acquire rudimentary understanding of these concepts quickly.
Empiricists argue that nature only gives infants general learning mechanisms and the rapid formation of fundamental concepts comes from infant’s exposure to experiences that are relevant to these concepts.
This debate reflects the fundamental question about human nature: do children for all concepts through the same learning mechanisms, or do they also possess special mechanisms for forming a few particularly important concepts?
Understanding Who or What
Dividing Objects into Categories
Some concepts apply to all things, others only apply to living things, others apply only to people
Forming these general cateogires allows children to draw accurate inferences about unfamiliar entities.
Ex. platypus is an animal → so a platypus can move, eat, grow, reproduce…
Children form more specific categories
ex. objects → vehicles, tools, furniture…
Category hierarchies - a category that is organized by set-subset relations like animal → dog → poodle.
Categorization of Objects in Infancy
Infants form categories of objects in the first few months of life (when shown photographs of cats, they habituated, and when shown photographs of other animals, they dishabituated).
More general categories are made as well, for example, when infants were shown different types of mammals (dogs, zebras, elephants…) and habituated but dishabituated when shown a bird or a fish. This shows infants can made broader categories like “mammal”.
Infants frequently use perceptual categorization which is the grouping of objects that have somewhat similar appearances, which goes back to the infants grouping dogs, zebras, and elephants together as different than birds or fish soley based on appearance.
Infants categorize based on many perceptual dimensions like colour, size, and movement.
Often the categorization is based on specific parts of an object rather than it’s whole (legs to categorize objects as animals and wheels to categorizes objects as vehicles).
At 2 years old, children categorize on overall shape more than size, texture, and colour.
Categorization of Objects Beyond Infancy
Category Hierarchies
3 levels: (in animal/dog/poodle example) superordinate level (general, animal), subordinate level (very specific, poodle), basic level (medium, dog).
In the plant/tree/oak example, trees have more consistent characteristics than plants in general, so children tend to form basic level categories first.
Parents refer to basic-level categories to teach children subordinate-level terms.
Ex. “belugas are a type of whale”
Casual Understanding and Categorization
Infants have a rudimentary understanding of casual interactions among objects (gravity, idleness, support).
Ex. at 3 months of age, infants look longer at a box that is floating rather than falling, but if there is any contact between the box and a support, they do not react. At 5 months, infants learn the importance of contact in support. After 1 year, infants take into account the shape of an object and are surprised if one stays stable. This casual understanding extends to moving objects as well.
Understanding casual relations is crucial in forming any categories.
Ex. children can’t form the category of “light switches” if they did not understand that flipping or pushing certain objects makes lights go on and off.
Cause-effect relations
4-5 year olds were told about two categories of imaginary animals. Some were given physical descriptions, and others were given physical descriptions along with a casual story that explained why wugs and gillies are the way they are. They were shown pictures and asked which is which, and those who were told why the animals are the way they are remembered the categories better than the children who didn’t get explanations. So, cause and effect relations help children learn and remember.
Understanding Oneself and Other People
Naïve psychology is a commonsense level of undertstanding of other people and oneself, and it is crucial to normal human functioning.
At the center of this are 3 concepts that are used to understand human behaviour → desires, beliefs, and actions.
We apply these everytime we think about why someone did something.
Ex. why did Jimmy go to Billy’s house? He wanted to play with Billy (desire), he expected that Billy would be at home (belief), so he went to Billy’s house (action).
The properties of these are noteworthy because they refer to invisible mental states (no one can see desires or beliefs, or perception or memory), are linked to cause-effect relations (what will happen if Billy isn’t home?), and they develop surprisingly early in life.
Naïve Psychology in Infancy
Nativists argue early understanding is possible because children are born with a basic understanding of human psychology and empiricists argue experiences with other people and general information-processing capacities are the key sources of early understanding of other people.
The emergence of self-consciousness
Infants seem to be born with a kind of implicit self-consciousness (an understanding that they are seperate from other people and can act in ways that accomplish their goals).
At 4 months, infants show a basic understanding of what they can and can’t do, and at 18-24 months they try to wipe smudges of their faces and make efforts to look good to other people.
Understanding other people
Infants in their first year find other people interesting, pay careful attention to them, and learn an impressive amount about them.
They prefer to look at faces than objects, imitate facial movements, and imitate similar looking motions of inanimate objects.
Through imitation and forming emotional bonds with other people, infants encourage more interaction, which creates more opportunities for infants to acquire psychological understanding of people in general and differences between individuals.
Infants learn that other people’s behaviours have purpose and are goal-directed, and they understand that they understand the motion of nonliving things does not reflect the nonliving things’ intentions.
Infants do seem to attribute intentions to nonliving things under some conditions however, like in cartoons.
In a study with cartoons, 10-month-olds were shown a video showing a ball, cube, and a pyramid with googly eyes attached where the pyramid helped the ball and cube did not. When the ball approached the unhelpful cube instead of the helpful pyramid, the infants looked longer, indicating their understanding of the intentions of the objects and surprise at the preference of the hinderer instead of the helper.
This effect is real, but inconsistent.
Understanding differences between people
Infants understand individual differences among people.
10-month-olds are more likey to choose a food offered by a speaker of their language than by a speaker of another language…
Infants also have a preference for niceness but it only goes so far, for when a “mean puppet” offered them 8 crackers and the “nice puppet” only offered one, they took the 8.
Naïve Psychology Beyond the First Year
In the second year several important aspects of psychological understanding emerge: (1) sense of self (children realize they are indivduals) (2) joint attention (2 or more people focus on the same thing on purpose), & (3) intersubjectivity (the mutual understanding that people share during communication).
This emerging understanding of other people gives insight into emotions.
When children are okay, 1-year-olds often offer physical comfort and comforting comments. Presumably because of experiences with their own emotions and what soothes them when they are upset, children make these insights and suggestions.
Theory of Mind
The growth of a theory of mind
Infants and preschoolers naïve psychology with the interest in other people provides the foundation for a theory of mind which is an organized understanding of how mental processes like intentions, beliefs, desires, perceptions and emotions influence behaviour.
Preschoolers theory of mind includes that desires originate from physiological states (hunger, pain) or from psychological states (wanting to see a friend) and that desires and beliefs produce actions, and differences in people’s beliefs lead to differences in their actions.
Understanding that people’s desires guide their actions develops towards the end of the first year.
The understanding that desires lead to actions is firmly established by 2 years.
Children of this age predict characters in stories act in accord with their own desires as well, even when those desires differ from the child’s preferences.
By 3 years, children show some understanding between beliefs and actions, but it is limited in important ways, one being false belief problems.
False-belief problems are when another person believes something to be true that the child knows is false. The question is: will the child think that the other person will act in accord with his or her own false belief or in accord with the child’s correct understanding?
An experiment was conducted where preschoolers are shown a box that has a picture of Smarties on it. When asked what was in it, the child says “smarties”, but there are actually pencils inside. When asked what another child would say in their situation, the child said “pencils”, which does not make sense as the other child would logically assume there to be smarties inside. The 3-year-old’s responses show that they have difficulty understanding that other people act on their won beliefs, even when they are false, and that other people do not necessarily know what the child knows.
However, if an experimenter tells a 3-year-old that the two of them are going to play a trick on another child by hiding pencils inside, most 3-year-olds correctly predict that the box contains smarties.
Explaining the development of theory of mind
Findings on improvements in a typical child’s theory of mind between ages 3-5 don’t tell us what causes the improvement, which has caused enormous controversy.
Nativists have proposed the existence of a theory of mind module (TOMM) which is a hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings.
Advocates of this argue that the TOMM matures over the first 5 years, producing an increasingly sophisticated understanding of people’s minds.
Studies of children with ASD are often cited to support the idea of TOMM as these children have difficulty with false-belief problems as well as with understanding people generally. So, the reasoning is that these difficulties appear to be due to atypical sizes and activity of certain brain areas that are crucial for understanding people.
Empiricists emphasizes the role of learning from experiences with physical situations and with other people.
Ex. preschoolers with siblings (especially when the sibling is of the opposite sex) outperform peers who do not on false-belief tasks, presumably because interaction with those whose interests, desires, and motives are different from their own broadens children’s understanding of other people and how they differ from themselves.
Repeated exposure to other people acting on false beliefs has been found to produce substantial improvements among 3-year-olds who had relatively advanced understanding before the experiences. From this perspective the tendency of autistic children not to interact with other people seems to be a major contributor to their difficulty in understanding others.
Other empiricists emphasize the growth of general information-processing skills as essential to understanding other people’s minds, saying that children’s understanding of false-belief problems is correlated with their ability to reason about complex counterfactual statements and with their ability to inhibit their own behavioural propensities when necessary.
All these explanations have merit.
The Growth of Play
Children learn about other people’s thinking through play (activities that are pursued only for fun).
Between 12-18 months of age, pretend play (make-believe activities in which children create new symbolic relations) emerges.
Children act like they are in a different situation than their actual one, often engaging in object substitution which is ignoring the properties of the object to pretend it’s something else.
Pretend play emerges in interactions between infants and their parents in societies that emphasize such interactions.
Pretend play becomes more complex and involves more people over the next few years of age.
Toddlers begin to engage in sociodramatic play which is a kind of pretend play where children enact mini dramas with other people like “mother comforting baby” or “doctor helping sick child” or the very famous “tea party”.
Young children’s sociodramatic play is typically more sophisticated when playing with a parent or older sibling who can scaffold the play sequence rather than when they are playing with a peer.
Play becomes even more complex and social by the elementary school years as it includes activities like sports and board games which have rules participants must follow.
Pretend play may expand children’s understanding of the social world as those who engage in pretend play tend to show greater understanding of other people’s thinking and emotions.
The type matters, as social pretend play is more strongly related to understanding other people’s thinking than nonsocial pretend play.
Preschoolers learn from watch other’s pretend play.
There is limited evidence for a cause-effect relation as:
both frequent pretend play and high levels of social understanding may be caused by parents who promote both.
and some children with high social skills simply enjoy engaging in pretend play and thinking about other people (active child theme).
Imaginary companions
Children talk to imaginary companions for companionship, enteratinment, enjoyment of fantasy, to deflect blame, vent anger, and to tell info that the child is reluctant to state directly (asking for a friend, or a friend was saying). Children also report that imaginary companions comfort them.
Knowledge of Living Things
By 4-5 years, children have impressive knowledge about living things, but have a variety of immature beliefs and reasoning.
Children often fail to understand the difference between artifacts, like chairs and cars, that are built for specific purposes and living things, like monkeys, that are not created for any purpose.
Incorrect beliefs about which things are living and which are not (ex. plants are not alive and the moon is…).
Some investigators conclude that children have a fragemented view of living things until 7-10 years old, but others believe that 5 year olds understand the essentials but are confused on a few points. Another view is that young children possess both mature and immature biological understandings.
Distinguishing Living from Nonliving Things
Infants act differently toward nonliving things than towards people.
Children know quite a bit about the similarities among all living creatures and the differences between living creatures and inanimate objects.
Their knowledge is not limited to visible properties but biological properties as well.
Children don’t recognize plants as living things until 7-9 years old, part of the reason being that children equate being alive with being able to move in ways that promote survival (which plants do in a smaller, more unnoticeable scale).
Culture plays a part in this as children who grow up in rural areas realize plants are living things younger than children who grow up in cities and suburbs.
Understanding Biological Processes
3-4 year olds recognize that desires influence what people do and some biological processes are independent of one’s desires.
Preschoolers understand that properties of living things serve important functions for the organism, but this does not go for inanimate objects (plants are green so they can make food, but emerald being green doesn’t do anything for it).
Inheritance
3-4 year olds know that physical characteristics tend to be passed on from parent to offspring.
Older preschoolers know that certain aspects of development are determined by heredity rather than by environment (A robin raised by a bluebird will grow up to become an adult robin, not a bluebird).
Children do have numerous misguided beliefs:
like that mother’s desires play a role in what children inherit in terms of physical qualities.
Preschoolers also believe adopted children are likely to look like their adoptive parents.
In another situations children dismiss the effects of environment (believing boys and girls play preferences are hereditary and not because of societal expecatation).
Essentialism is the view that living things have an essence that makes them what they are leading to the persepctive that essence is what makes all living things in a category similar to one another and different from members of other categories (inner dogness leads to dogs barking and liking to be petted).
Growth, illness, and healing
Preschoolers realize growth is a product of internal processes and generally proceeds in only one direction until old age when they can become smaller or larger at any point in time.
Preschoolers show a basic understanding of illness with their knowledge of germs and general sense of how they operate.
Preschoolers know that plants and animals, unlike inanimate objects, have internal processes that allow them to regain prior states or attributes, and that living things’ recuperative processes have limits.
How Do Children Acquire Biological Knowledge
Nativists propose humans are born with a “biology module” like the TOMM that helps children learn quickly about living things.
3 main arguments for this:
During earlier periods of our evolution, it was crucial for human survival that children learn quickly about animals and plants.
Children are fascinated by plants and animals and learn bout them quickly and easily throughout the world.
Children all around the world organize information about plants and animals in very similar ways (growth, reporduction, inheritance, illness, healing).
Empiricists say children’s biological undersanding comes from personal observations and information they receive from parents, teachers, and general culture.
Empricists also note childrens biological understanding reflects views of culture.
Both nature and nurture play important roles in acquisition of biological understanding.
Understanding Why, Where, When, and How Many
Causality
Causal connections unite discrete events into coherent wholes.
This makes sense beause children rely on their understanding of causal mechanisms to infer why physical and psychological events occur.
Nativists believe infants have an innate causal module or core theory that allows them to extract causal relations from the events they observe.
Empiricists propose causal understanding arises from observations of events in the environment and the causal effects of their own actions.
Causal Reasoning in Infancy
By 6 months, infants perceive causal connections among some physical events.
Infants understanding of physical causality influence their expectations about inanimate objects and their ability to remember and imitate sequences of actions.
By the end of 2 years, children can infer the causal impact of one variable based on indirectly relevant info about another.
Causal Reasoning During the Preschool Period
Preschoolers seem to expect that if a variable causes an effect, it should do so consistently and if it doesn’t, they infer another variable must be causing the effect.
Preschooler’s emerging understanding that events have causes also influence their reactions to magic tricks, mostly by age 5.
Space
Nativists argue children have an innate module for only representing and learning about space that processes spatial info seperate from other info.
Empiricists argue that children only acquire spatial representations through general learning mechanisms and experiences that produce cognitive growth in general and that children combine spatial and nonspatial info to learn, and these experiences with locomotion, language and cultural tools (jigsaws) shapes spatial development.
Both groups agree that infants show impressive understanding of some spacial concepts, the environment simulates processing of spatial info, certain parts of brain are specialized for coding some types of spatial info, and geometric information is important in spatial prcocessing.
Representing Space Relative to Oneself
Children code locations of objects in relation to their own bodies.
Infant’s representations of spatial locations become increasingly durable letting them find objects they observed being hidden seconds earlier.
This is in part due to brain maturation particularly of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is an area involved in the formation and maintenance of plans and the integration of new and learned info.
It is also due to learning.
Piaget’s theory is that during the sensoriomotor period infants can only form egocentric spatial representations in which the locations of objects are coded relative to the infant’s position at the time of coding (looking to the right to find a toy when it’s always on the baby’s right)
This is not absolute as babies still use landmarks.
Self-locomotion (self-propelled movement) helps infants acquire a sense of space independent of their own location.
Self-locomotion also enhances older children’s spatial coding.
Assembling puzzles contributes to spatial development beyond infancy as putting together puzzles requires identifying appropriate pieces for specific locations and physically rotating them into the proper orientation.
Mental rotation builds spatial-reasoning skills that can be used in future situations.
Representing Spatial Relations in the External Environment
Infants use landmarks to code the location of objects they observe being hidden, but for young infants to use a landmark successfully, it needs to be the only obvious one in the space, and must be located right next to the hidden object.
Children have more difficulty forming a spatial representation without distinctive landmarks.
Toddlers show some degree of navigational ability.
Precisely coding locations wtihout obvious landmarks is difficult for people well beyond 2 years of age.
6-8 year olds are not good at it but 12 year olds are better and adults vary tremendously.
The degree to which people develop spatial skills is strongly influenced by the importance of such skills in their culture.
Time
Experiencing Time
Infants know the order in which events occur from 3 months old.
Infants have an approximate sense of the duration of events.
Infants can discriminate between longer and shorter durations.
The ratio of the durations rather than the absolute length is crucial for noticing differences.
Preschoolers possess some knowledge about longer periods like weeks, months, and years.
They know when one event was more recent for example.
The ability to distinguish more precisely among the timing of past events develops gradually during middle childhood.
Understanding the timing of future events increases during this age.
Children are subject to certain illusions about time becuse of the role attention plays in time perception.
Ex. when focusing on the passage of time at the end of which is a prize, the duration seems to be much longer than if they were not paying attention to the time. When one has little to do, they percieve the duration as longer than when they are busy as well.
Reasoning About Time
Children become better at reasoning about time during middle childhood.
They are able to infer that if 2 events started at the same time but one ended later than the other, the one that ended later lasted longer.
Children as young as 5 can make logical inferences about time but only in simple sitautions.
In less straight-foward sitautions, children tend to center on a single dimension and ignore other more relevant ones (which leads into Piaget’s idea of centration).
Number
Nativist/empiricist debate
Nativists argue that children are born with a core concept of number with special mechanisms for representing and learning about relative numbers of objects in sets, counting, and addition and substraction.
Empiricists argue children learn about numbers through the same types of experiences and learning mechanisms that help them acquire other concepts.
Numerical Equality
Numerical equality is the realization that all sets of N objects have something in common (two dogs, two cups and two shoes all share the property of “twoness”).
Newborns have some sense of numerical equality in a nonlinguistic sense.
Infant’s discrimiantions between numerical sets depend on the ratio of the number of entities in them.
Discrimination among numbers becomes more precise at and beyond 1 years old.
By 6 months, infants tell the difference between sets with 2:1 ratios (16 versus 8 dots or sounds) but they cant with ratios of 3:2 (12 versus 8 dots or sounds). Most adults can tell the difference between 8:7 ratios.
Discrimination between very small sets is more accurate, faster, and less variable than would be expected from ratios.
This phenomenon indicates there are at least 2 different mechanisms for processing the # of sights and sounds (one based on specific numbers and one based on ratios).
Infant’s Arithmetic
Infants can perform approximate arithmetic and know when objects don’t add up numerically.
Counting
Children begin to count verbally at 2 years of age.
2 year olds often don’t know whether 3 is bigger than 5 or 5 is bigger than 3, but can count from 1-10.
Initial counting resembles singing a song in an unfamiliar language.
Learning the meaning of the counting words occurs number by number.
Preschoolers acquire understanding of five principles underlying counting:
One-one correspondence: each object must be labeled by a single number word.
Stable order: the numbers should always be recited in the same order.
Cardinality: the number of objects in the set corresponds to the last number stated.
Order irrelevance: objects can be counted left-right, right-left or in any order.
Abstraction: any set of discrete objects of events can be counted.
If 4-5-year-olds see someone counting a way that violates their prinicples, they say the counting is wrong, but when they see someone counting differently without violating any principles, they say the counting is correct, even if they would not count they same way. This realization shows that they understand the principles.
Cultural difference has an impact on counting proficiency in mathematical skill.
Relations Among Understanding of Space, Time, and Number
Piaget hypothesized that infants possess only a general concept of magnitude, lack specific concepts of space, time and number.
It has been proven that infants appear to have both a general concept of magnitude as well as the more specific concepts of time, space, and number Piaget thought they lack.