Wednesday, March 18, 2015

April 6: Michael Lewis


The Rise of Consciousness and the Development of Emotional Life
Michael Lewis
Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
 
Human newborns arrive with a multitude of behaviors, or “action patterns,” that connect them to their physical worlds; for example, tasting a bitter food elicits a recognizable expression of disgust.  Action patterns are not learned, but are readily influenced by temperament and social interactions.  With the emergence of consciousness these early competencies become reflected feelings, giving rise to the self-conscious emotions of empathy, envy, embarrassment, and, later, shame, guilt, and pride.  Beginning as responses to particular physical events, emotions later become elicited by ideas about the self and the world.  The ability to think about ourselves is not only what gives meaning to our emotional lives, but also what enables us to make choices, evaluate our behavior, and make plans for the future. 


This talk will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.


Tuesday, March 10, 2015

March 16: Katie Kimura & Shaun O'Grady

Department of Psychology Graduate students, Katie Kimura and Shaun O'Grady, will be presenting their research.

Katie Kimura:

Transfer of number concepts in bilingual learners 

Why do young children take months and, often times, years to learn the meanings of number words? In this presentation, I will describe two factors, each of which might independently contribute to the delay. First, children may need to construct numerical concepts, such as ‘exactly one’ or ‘exactly two’, before they can reliably comprehend one and two. Second, children may have difficulty mapping language-specific words like one in English or uno in Spanish onto these concepts. To examine the relative contribution of these two factors, I will discuss number word learning in bilingual preschoolers, who must solve the linguistic mapping problem twice, once for each language. Our findings suggest that: (1) children learn the meanings of small number words (i.e., one, two, and three) independently in both languages, (2) children learn to accurately count larger sets (i.e., five or greater) simultaneously in both languages, (3) children learn the counting procedure prior to learning the rules that govern counting, and (4) children incrementally learn that the successor of n denotes a cardinality of n + 1. I will conclude that delays in learning the meanings of small number word are mainly due to language-specific processes of mapping words to concepts, whereas the logic and procedures of counting appear to be learned independent of a particular language and thus transfers rapidly from one language to the other in development. 

Shaun O'Grady:

Preliminary Results from a Probabilistic Discrimination Task for 5-7-year-old 
Children

Recent evidence suggests that even infants can form expectations about the probability of certain events.  Although probabilistic reasoning has been well studied in infants and children, relatively little is known about the acuity of this proportional reasoning system and how this acuity changes across development.  In this study we are investigating early school aged (5-7 year olds) children's ability to reason about probability by comparing different proportions of red and white marbles.  

During the task children sit with the experimenter in front of a laptop that displays a game in which they get to help Big Bird collect red marbles.  Children are told that Big Bird will close his eyes and take one marble randomly out of a bag of red and white marbles and their job is to help Big Bird by telling him which bag he should choose.  Before Big Bird makes a selection the child sees how many red and white marbles are in each bag.  For each comparison there is one bag that has a higher proportion of red marbles and is therefore the best choice for getting a red marble.  After the child sees the contents of both bags of marbles they can press a button to tell Big Bird which bag he should choose.  Big Bird’s preference for either red or white marbles was counterbalanced between subjects where half of the children played the game with Big Bird preferring red marbles and the other half played with Big Bird preferring white marbles.

Preliminary results from 7 and 6 year olds indicate that children of both ages perform the task above chance and that older children have a higher acuity for discriminating different probabilities.  Performance decreased as the difference in the proportions of red and white marbles decreased which supports the hypothesis that children’s reasoning about probability is based on the use of a system for approximating number.  Children’s performance did not differ for trials in which either the total number of marbles in each bag were equal or trials with an equal number of target color marbles but with different total number of marbles indicating that children did not simply choose bags based on comparisons of the total number of target marbles.  Future studies will investigate the influence or spatial variables such as area and circumference on children’s probabilistic judgments.

These talks will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.
___________________________