All talks are held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm
(1/25)
2/1 Prof. Stella Christie, Dept. of
Psychology, Swarthmore College
Title:
Learning by Alignment
Abstract: Comparison is ubiquitous, but to learn something
useful from a comparison you have to align. In this talk I discuss the process
of alignment and its results for learning. First, I show that alignment
produces learning of new relational concepts whereas simply seeing two
exemplars does not. Second, young children take alignment into account when
learning from others—they prefer to learn from people who use informative
alignment. Third, alignment plays a role in social cognition—young learners
engage in an alignment process to decide whom they want to socially imitate.
(2/8) TBD
2/15 – President’s day holiday
2/22 Ariel Starr (Postdoctoral fellow, UCB)
Title: From Magnitudes to Math: Developmental Precursors of
Quantitative Reasoning
Abstract: The uniquely human mathematical mind sets us apart from all
other animals. How does this powerful capacity emerge over development?
Although humans typically think about number symbolically, we also possess
nonverbal representations of quantity that are present at birth and shared with
many other animal species. These primitive numerical representations are
thought to arise from an evolutionarily ancient system termed the Approximate
Number System (ANS). My research aims to determine how these preverbal representations
of quantity may serve as the foundation for more complex quantitative reasoning
abilities through two primary lines of research: 1) How do representations of
number relate to representations of other quantities in infancy and early
childhood? 2) How do these representations support the acquisition of symbolic
math skills? Taken together, this research suggests that number is a salient
feature of the environment throughout early childhood and demonstrates that
approximate number representations can be used as building blocks for the
acquisition of symbolic math skills.
2/29 Daniel Dukes (Visiting graduate student, University of Geneva,
Switzerland)
Title: Affective Social
Learning and the Role of Interest
Abstract: Newcomers to any culture have not
only to learn about the nature of the different components of their environment
(semantic knowledge) and about how to use those components
(procedural knowledge), they also have to understand
how the members of their new cultural group value those objects (Clément &
Dukes, 2013). This, we argue, is accomplished through
Affective Social
Learning (ASL) - an umbrella term coined to organize concepts such as
social referencing and social appraisal, which highlight the use of other
people's affective expressions to learn about the environment, in terms of the
necessary ostensive input of the 'teacher' (Clément & Dukes, under review).
In this presentation, this term will
be introduced and the (understudied) emotion of interest will be investigated
as a candidate for being the 'oil in the ASL machine'. For example, in one
study, while 12 month olds choose an object significantly more often than
chance that had previously been looked at with
interest by a
third-party, 15 month olds chose the other object significantly more often than
chance which had been previously looked at with
disinterest. These
findings, and others, will be discussed within the context of ASL, as I reach
the final months before my doctoral thesis deadline.
3/7 Adrienne Wente (student presentation)
3/14 Alison Miller Singly (student presentation)
3/21 – Spring break holiday
3/28 Shaun O’Grady & Ruthe Foushee
(First or Second-year presentations)
4/4 Katie Kimura & Mariel Goddu (First or
Second-year presentations)
4/11) TBD
4/18 Frances Nkara & Sophia Sanborn (First or
Second-year presentations)
4/25 Exit talk (Zi Lin Sim)
