Infancy & Early Childhood
Why Study Infants
•	“Child is father to the man”
•	Heredity vs environment
•	Ancient problems of knowledge
•	Parsing the mind
•	Evolution connections
Heredity vs Environment
•	Support for genetic program
–	Early appearance
–	Sudden appearance
–	Universal appearance at same age
•	Support for environment
–	Study parental teaching – what parents so
–	Imitation of parents and peers
The Problem of Knowledge
•	Old style was innate vs. learned
•	New version
–	Some innate knowledge
–	Innately guided learning 
–	Imitation learning
What Infants Have to Learn
•	Understanding other people
–	As social skill
–	As way to understand self
•	Understanding objects and their behavior
•	Communication and language
Parsing the Mind
•	Psychological terms not necessarily map onto biology
•	Functional equivalence and difference
•	Different patterns of appearance
•	The coordination metaphor
–	Walking-running
–	Throwing
The Evolution Connection
•	Some features not left to chance
•	Long period of helplessness explained
–	Birthing issues
–	Learning vs. genetic programs
–	But programs to learn from environment
•	Some possibilities
–	Bonding with caretakers
–	Responsiveness of adults
–	Learning from others
The Cognitive Sciences Approach
•	Areas
–	Psychology
–	Linguistics
–	Philosophy
–	Computers and electrical engineering
–	Neurology
•	The computational model – Pinker
How to Study Infants
•	Pre-language
–	Looking behavior – look preferentially at certain stimuli
–	Habituation
•	Boredom 
•	Surprise
•	Early language
–	First words
–	Categorization
–	Category errors
Social Tricks – Problems of Other Minds
•	Social preferences
•	Early imitation
•	Pointing 
•	Transparent vs. representational mental content
Social Preferences in First Few Weeks
•	Show preferences for human faces
•	And respond to human voices preferentially
•	Recognize familiar faces and voices
•	By 6 mo have gender discrimination
Early Imitation (Birth – 3 mo)
•	Tongue trick at birth
–	Why important
–	Innate knowledge
•	Imitate other gestures and coordination of body and voice
•	The importance of imitation
Pointing (12 mo)
•	Pointing tricks
–	Look at others while pointing to gauge response
–	Look where others point
–	Will point to desired object – early communication
•	Importance of pointing
Understanding Other Minds
•	Behavior has meaning because of intentions
•	Have to understand mental causes of behavior
•	Usual assumption is that knowledge goes from personal to social
Transparent vs Representational Mental Content
•	Transparent – perceptions, emotions, desires
–	Directly tied to objects
–	Not usually faked
–	Can be wrong (inaccurate) but not false
•	Representational – beliefs and thoughts
–	Less obviously tied to external world
–	Represent the outside world
–	Can be false
Recognition of Belief Differences (18 mo)
•	Child learns that others have different desires (transparent)
–	Broccoli experiment
•	Beginnings of empathy
•	Terrible Twos
–	Experimenting with disagreement
Recognition of Different Beliefs
•	By 4 or 5 children understand different beliefs (representational)
–	False beliefs test
–	Understand that their own beliefs can change
•	Present beliefs guided past behavior
•	Problems with autobiographical memory
–	Autism
•	Probably created more by siblings than parents
–	Former try to find common ground
–	Older sibs point out errors
Empathy
•	Understanding different beliefs is first step in true empathy
•	By 10 weeks babies imitate happiness and anger
•	By 12 mo respond to other’s distress with emotion and helping behavior  
Personal Causality
•	Infants understand helping and hindering 
•	12 mo olds see movie
–	Circle tries to go up an incline
–	Triangle pushes and square hinders
–	More surprised by movie of circle approaching the square
Negotiating the Physical World
•	Object segregation and identification
•	Perceptual coordination
•	Object permanence
•	Causality
•	Categories
Object Segregation
•	Perceptual field does not give objects
•	Have to segregate 
•	Early attention to lines and stripes
•	Movement and common fate
–	Surprised by object explosion after movement in common
–	Predict movement well
Perceptual Coordination
•	Understand distance and size constancy
•	Eye-hand coordination
•	Coordination of different sense modalities
–	Localize sounds
–	Locke’s puzzle about touch and sight
•	Thought would have to learn to make connections
•	Babies look longer at distinctive textured pacifer
Object Permanence
•	Piaget thought babes did not acquire until nearly 2
•	Before 9 mo hidden objects are “gone”
•	By 9-12 mo can search for hidden object
•	But cannot solve more complex puzzles
Causality
•	Hume’s skepticism and complex inferences
•	By 3 mo will work to make things happen – foot kicking and mobile movement
•	Seem to be confused about psychological and physical causation
•	By 12 mo more sophisticated knowledge
•	By 18 mo ca plan causal sequences
•	By 30-36 mo can give causal explanation
Representation and Art
•	Children's art
–	Terrible as representation
–	Yet they are clear what it represents
•	Know difference between pictures and reality?
–	Naming pictures does not require exposure to them
–	Child at 18 mo never exposed to pictures still names pictures and line drawings with ease
•	Words and pictures
–	Pictures used to teach children new words -- whisk
–	When asked to pick the whisk pick real whisk over picture 
Categories
•	Used constantly by adults
–	Nouns
–	Verbs
–	Adjectives
–	Adverbs
•	How learned by children
–	Problems with typical learning account
•	Denotation is uninformative (colors)
•	Language may not be crucial
•	Similarity tricky
•	Children eager for some knowledge
–	Innate?
Categorization
•	6 mo old baby preferences
–	Bored with items from same category
–	Perk up with new category
–	Suggesting primitive categorization
•	By 12 mo spontaneous sorting in play
Types of Categories
•	By 24-30 mo children grasp essences
–	Feature of one instance generalizes to others
–	Based on name but not appearance
•	Functional categories
–	Based on behavior or effects
–	Not on similarity
–	Blicket experiment
•	Natural kinds and artifacts
Natural Kinds
•	Based on physical or biological classification
•	By 3 children more willing to generalize features for natural kinds
•	Understand laws of inheritance
–	Animals
–	Hirschfeld on race
•	Body shape and skin color
•	But not dress or occupation
Artifacts
•	Made for particular purposes
•	Superficial changes – cat with stripes in not a skunk
•	Insides vs. outsides
•	By 3 children responsive to intentions
–	More likely to see an object as thing if intentionally created
–	Than if accidental
The Legacy of Essentialism
•	Children over-essentialism categories
•	And perhaps adults do as well
–	Gender
–	Race
Learning Language
•	Importance
–	Thought
–	Communication
•	What is learned
–	Speech sounds
–	Word meanings
–	Grammar
–	Appropriateness and normative rules
•	Greatest accomplishment of first 36 mo
Speech Sounds
•	Infants capable of all human speech sounds
•	Initially babies can distinguish all sounds
–	r and l easily distinguished by all children
–	But by 12 mo Japanese babies no longer hear the difference
–	By 12 mo American children cannot distinguish some sounds from other languages
Early Speech
•	The problem of segmentation of sounds
•	Babbling beings about 9 mo in all cultures
–	Infants use sounds from own language
–	As well as intonation patterns
–	Not explicitly taught and surely a genetic-maturational “program”
•	Love to imitate adult sounds
Learning Words
•	First words similar in all cultures
–	Parents
–	Success and failure
–	Goodbye in Western
•	Extensions and over generalization
•	Fast mapping – single exposure
The Problem of Reference
•	To what does a word refer
–	General issues
–	Object segmentation privileged 
•	Novelty 
–	Assume that word refers to novel object
–	“Oh look, a dax”
•	Speaker gaze and attention
•	Words emerge at same time as concepts
–	“All gone” with object permanence
–	“Uh-oh” to tool use 
Grammar
•	Complex learning
•	Children’s grammar is spare but consistent
–	Eliminate prepositions and conjunctions
–	Usually subject verb
–	But correct order
•	Complex forms learned later
–	Plurals
–	Gender in gendered languages (but easily learned)
–	Clauses
Parental speech
•	Motherese
–	Adults use in all cultures
–	Genetic-evolutionary program?
–	Babies love
•	Emphasize important sounds
Disgust
•	Before 36 mo babies not disgusted
•	After that are by usual adult things
•	Why?
–	Not taught
–	Evolutionarily important to be disgusted at point when independence from parents is growing
•	Usually related to reminders that we are animals
•	Rozin’s experiments with contagion
The Cognitive Science Approach
•	Children are pre-programmed with input-output routines
•	Programs dictate 
–	Experiences to be sought
–	How to interpret them
•	Programs change with experience
–	More sophisticated output
–	Programs are more complex
–	But is code rewritten or simply absorbed – magical thinking
Babies as Scientists
•	Both have initial hypotheses and expectations
•	Both seek data to confirm
–	Both upset by disconfirmation
–	Both resist it
•	But ultimately change theories with disconfirming data
The Evolutionary Connection
•	Babies have built in routines
–	Necessary for survival 
–	More importantly necessary for learning proper lessons and about culture
•	The standard environment
–	Babies have fairly standard physical environments
–	And don’t need an enriched one
–	Social environment also produced by evolutionary forces