Overview:
This lecture explores issues and ideas related to the branch of psychology known as cognitive development. It begins with an introduction of Piaget who, interested in the emergence of knowledge in general, studied children and the way they learn about the world in order to formulate his theories of cognitive development. This is followed by an introduction to the modern science of infant cognition. Finally, the question of the relationship between and the existence of different kinds of development is addressed.
Now, this research suggests that infants' understanding of the physical world is there from the very start, but at the same time not entirely. We know there are certain things babies don't know. Here's an example. Suppose you show babies this. You have a block here and then you have something above there floating in mid air. Babies find this surprising. Even six-month-olds find this surprising. It violates gravity, but six-month-olds aren't smart enough to know that a block just stuck over here is also surprising. Twelve-month-olds will think that it should fall. Six-month-olds don't, and even 12-month-olds don't find anything weird about this, while adults are sophisticated enough to understand that that's an unstable configuration and should fall over. So, although some things are built in, some things develop.
And this raises the question of, "How do we explain development?" How do we explain when babies come to know things that they didn't originally know? Well, one answer is neural maturation, growth of the brain. Most of the neurons you have now in your head, right now, you had when you were in your mother's uterus. What happens in development isn't for the most part the growth of new neurons. It's for the most part pruning, getting rid of neurons. So, the neural structures change radically as babies kind of get rid of excess neurons through development. At the same time though, connections between neurons grow like crazy and they--and this process of synaptic growth where there are the connections across different synapses peaks at about two years. Finally, remember myelination, where you sort of get this fatty sheath over your neuron to make it more effective? That also happens through development, and in fact, it goes through development and even teenagers are not fully myelinated. In particular, they're not fully myelinated in their frontal lobes. Recall that frontal lobes are involved in things like restraint and willpower. And so, it could be the problem is the baby's brain doesn't develop yet.
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Another interesting area of debate is, "What's the relationship between different sorts of development?" So, I started off with Piaget, and Piaget, like Freud, believed in general, across the board changes in how children think. An alternative, though, is that there's separate modules, and this is a view developed, again, by Noam Chomsky, and also by the philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, who claimed that the whole idea of a child developing as a single story is mistaken. What you get instead is there are separate pre-wired systems for reasoning about the world. These systems have some built-in knowledge, and they have to do some learning, but the learning pattern varies from system to system and there's a separateness to them. Why should we take this view seriously? Well, one reason is that there are developmental disorders that seem to involve damage to one system but not to another. And the classic case of this is a disorder known as autism. And autism is something I've always found a fascinating disorder for many reasons. It's actually why I entered psychology. I started off working with children with autism. And it could be taken as a striking illustration of how the social part of your brain is distinct from other parts of your brain.
So, what autism is is a disorder that strikes about one in a thousand people, mostly boys. And the dominant problems concern--consist of a lack of social connectedness, problems with language, problems dealing with people, and more generally, a problem of what the psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen has described as "mind blindness." In that autistic people show no impairments dealing with the physical world, they show no impairments on--they don't necessarily show any impairments on mathematical skills or spatial skills, but they have a lot of problems with people. Now, many autistic children have no language; they're totally shut off from society. But even some of them who'd learned language and who managed to get some sort of independent life, nevertheless will suffer from a severe social impairment. And this could be shown in all sorts of ways.
A simple experiment developed by Simon Baron-Cohen goes like this. You show this to three- and four-year-olds. There's four candies there, and you say, "This is Charlie in the middle. Which chocolate will Charlie take?" For most children and most of you, I hope, the answer's pretty clear: This one. Autistic children will often just shrug, say, "How could I know?" because they don't instinctively appreciate that people's interests and desires tend to be attuned to where they're looking.
Another sort of task, which is a task that's been done hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, is known as "the false-belief task" and here's the idea. You show the child the following situation. There's a doll named Maxie and Maxie puts the ball in the cupboard. Maxie leaves and a second doll enters. The second doll takes the ball out of the cupboard and puts it under the bed. Maxie comes back and the question is, "Where will Maxie look for the ball?" Now, this is a question about your understanding about minds. The question of where is the ball really is a question about the physical world. Everyone can solve it, but this question is hard. The right answer is Max will--Maxie will look in the cupboard, even though it's not really there because Maxie has a false belief about the world. Three-year-olds find this difficult. Two-year-olds find this difficult. Four-year-olds and five-year-olds are able to pass this task. Normal adults are able to pass this task. Children with autism have serious problems. And often, people with autism who are otherwise very high functioning will fail this task. They'll say, "Oh, he must think it's not--He'll--He's going to check under the bed." Any questions about autism? Yes.
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Another question is if you believe in modules--If there are modules, what are they? And so far when reviewing the developmental data we've talked about two of them: physics and people. An object module and a social module. But other people have argued that there is a special module in your brain for dealing with artifacts, that is, things like tables and chairs and cars and forks. Some people have argued there's a module for sociology, for dealing with human groups, races and classes and so on. Some have even argued that there is an intuitive biology, a common-sense biological understanding of the world that's separate from your understanding of people and physics. And, in fact, the most dominant proponent of the view is our very own Frank Keil, Master of Morse College at Yale, who has strongly defended the notion of an intuitive biological module.
Final question, just to raise: I've talked in terms of the modular view but there might also be profound general differences between children and adults, not just specific to how you think about objects or how you think about people or how you think about this or how you think about that, but rather more general. And one claim, which we're going to return to briefly next class when we talk about language, is that there's a very, very big difference between a creature that doesn't have language and a creature that does. And part of the claim is that learning a language, learning to speak, reconfigures the human brain in such a way that is really exceptional. And that has no parallel in any other species. And this is an interesting claim and one we'll talk about.
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