April 20: Catherine Snow, Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor, Harvard University

The Neglected Literacy Skill

Despite robust evidence that classroom discussions promote academic outcomes, multiple forces converge to make authentic discussion a rare event in most U.S. classrooms.  We have been evaluating the contribution of discussion to reading comprehension outcomes among 4th-8th graders attending urban schools, and testing hypotheses about the mechanisms by which discussion enhances reading and writing skills.

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

 

April 13: Adrienne Wente & Ruthe Foushee

Department of Psychology Graduate students, Adrienne Wente and Ruthe Foushee, will be presenting their research.

Adrienne Wente:

The development of free will beliefs in Chinese and U.S. children
This talk will discuss the development of beliefs about free will in Chinese and U.S. children. Here, free will is defined as the ability to choose to do otherwise. In this study, Chinese and U.S. 4- and 6-year-olds answered a series of questions to gauge whether they believe that they themselves and other people can freely choose to inhibit or act against their desires. Children were also asked to explain why they believe people can practice choice. Results indicate that children from both cultures increase the amount of choice they ascribed with age. However, findings also suggest cultural variability both in how much choice children ascribe, as well as how they
characterize the causal process of choice.

Ruthe Foushee:

Subjective Semantics: Children's semantic development and theory of mind

While semantic compositionality is fundamental to language, and must ultimately be mastered by the child, developing a compositional semantics might be difficult in part because some words have subjective meanings. Some words, like “pretty” (or “tasty,” etc.), are inherently subjective: whether or not a dax is “pretty” doesn’t depend on any property of the world, but is instead a matter of personal preference that speakers can disagree about. By contrast, other words, like “striped” (or “square,” etc.) have fixed, objective meanings: whether or not a dax is “striped” depends on whether the dax has stripes, and is independent of who is describing the dax. Finally, although the meanings of other words like “tall” (or “big,” etc.) depend on objective properties – e.g., for a dax to be “tall” it must be taller than most other daxes – they can also be subjective, and depend on a person’s past experience. 
I will be talking about the theoretical background and methods for a project in its early stages exploring children’s ability to integrate subjectivity in their compositional semantics, which requires them to coordinate not only their knowledge about word meanings and the world, but also to consider others’ personal preferences and past experiences. Preliminary data suggests that adults are sensitive to speakers' personal experience in evaluating the truth of their utterances using vague predicates, and that this sensitivity is developing during the preschool years. 

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

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.

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.

___________________________

March 9: Candice Odgers

Income Inequality and the Developing Child

Low-income children growing up in economically mixed neighborhoods are expected to benefit from higher quality schools, more prosocial peer groups and greater access to amenities and opportunities. Contrary to this belief, new research from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study finds that low-income children fare worse when they grow up in the ‘shadow of wealth’ as compared to their low-income peers living in concentrated poverty. The importance of examining both local area poverty and inequality on children’s behavior is highlighted, alongside a description of new methods for capturing neighborhood and momentary effects in studies of child development.

Brief Bio: Candice Odgers is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, Psychology and Neuroscience and Associate Director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia and completed her postdoctoral training at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre in London, England. Her research focuses on how social inequalities and early adversity influence children’s future health and well-being, with an emphasis on how new technologies, including mobile phones and web-based tools, can be used to understand and improve the lives of young people. Odgers was a William T. Grant Scholar and the recipient of early career awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development and the Royal Society of Canada. Most recently, she received the Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science for transformative early career contributions to psychological science. More information about her current work can be found on the following website: adaptlab.org

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

Feb. 23: Mark Seidenberg

The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications
Research in cognitive science, developmental science, and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I will mainly focus on the United States, where the reading levels of about 25-30% of the population are low by standard metrics, with an eye on comparisons to other countries. I will consider three possible contributing factors: the fact that English has a deep alphabetic orthography; how reading is taught; and the impact of linguistic variability as manifested in the US by the Black-White “achievement gap”. I conclude that there are opportunities to increase literacy levels by making better use of what we have learned about reading and language, but also institutional obstacles and understudied issues for which more evidence is badly needed.

BIO:
Mark S. Seidenberg is Hilldale and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has conducted research on many topics related to reading and language since the disco era. His reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read, dyslexia, and the brain bases of reading, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging. His current research focuses on the causes of chronically low reading performance among poor and minority children, particularly the effects of language background on learning to read. He is among the most highly cited researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. His book Reading Matters will be published by Basic Books (late 2015).

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

Feb. 9: Tamar Kushnir

Meeting in the middle: acting and learning in social environments

In the course of a typical day, an individual child will encounter a range of social situations, all of which afford the opportunity to learn.   Patient, caring adults may be engaged with them in conversation or direct instruction. Playful groups of peers may attract their attention to interesting new objects or games.  Even when they are on their own, they may be exploring classrooms prepared intentionally by adults to facilitate their learning.

How do children learn in and from this changing social world? One idea is that children meet their social environments “in the middle”:  The more the social environment is one of direct pedagogy, the more a child has to rely upon her emerging theory of mind to learn. Conversely, the more the environment consists of social resources not directed at the child but nonetheless available to her, the more active she will be in gathering social information. This implies a need for a broader definition of social cognition, one that includes mental state inferences, active social engagement, and everything in between.

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