May 11: Minxuan He

Psychological Consequences of Walking in Typically Developing Infants: Perception and Language 

The acquisition of new skills in human infants often changes the person-environment relationship, which provide opportunities for psychological development. Abundant evidence has come out from studies on prone locomotion, i.e. crawling onset and experience using converging research operations. However, as another major developmental transaction and motoric milestone, the effect of upright locomotion, namely walking is under investigated. In this talk, I will present my work on the link between upright locomotion in typically developing infants and changes in two crucial psychological abilities, i.e. visual proprioception and language acquisition.

 

3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.

May 4: Andrea Urqueta Alfaro

Joint Engagement and Attachment Patterns in Infants with Visual Impairments

This research reports on two early childhood developments, joint engagement and attachment patterns, and explores a possible relationship between the two in a sample of 20 infants with various levels of visual impairments, without additional disabilities. Joint engagement and security and organization of attachment patterns have been associated with positive developmental outcomes, such as better language and socio-emotional skills, better performance in theory of mind tests, and reduced risk for psychopathology. 

Study 1 focuses on joint engagement, that is, infants’ coordination of their attention between a social partner and an external focus of shared interest. Infants and their caregivers were videotaped during 30-minute free play sessions at their homes. Videos were coded to establish the duration of joint engagement episodes, and the overall time dyads participated in it. Results showed that all infants tested participated in joint engagement and that the percentage of time it represented of the 30-minute free play session significantly increased between ages 12 and 18 months. The average duration of single episodes of joint engagement increased but only approached significance. The level of each infants’ visual impairment was described as reductions from norms in visual acuity and contrast sensitivity as measured using both visual evoked potential and preferential looking techniques. Of the visual measurements, infants’ reduction in contrast sensitivity measured with preferential looking technique predicted infants’ percentage of time in joint engagement across ages. This finding supports the importance of considering contrast sensitivity levels, rather than only those of visual acuity, in research with this population.

Study 2 focuses on attachment patterns. Infants and their caregivers underwent the Strange Situation Paradigm with added instructions to accommodate for the perceptual needs of infants with visual impairments. Results showed that all but 1 of the 27 SSPs collected were deemed classifiable. Most attachment patterns were secure, ranging between 56% in the younger group of infants tested, and 70% in the older group. Attachments coded as disorganized ranged between 22% and 6% in the younger and older groups respectively. 

Study 3 explores the relationship between infants’ security of attachment and the percentage of time they participated in joint engagement with their caregivers during free play. Results did not find a significant effect. This is in line with the mixed results in the literature on the connections of attachment and joint engagement, which not only varies in the finding of significant effects within a given population, but also varies between the results in different populations.

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

April 27: Caren Walker, Department of Psychology

 Learning by Thinking and the Development of Abstract Reasoning

By 5 years of age, children already have highly structured knowledge of the world and they routinely form rich, abstract representations that extend beyond their direct experiences. How do children learn so quickly and accurately from such limited information? The vast majority of research to date has explored this question by investigating children’s developing abilities to draw inductive inferences from their observations. However, one of the distinguishing features of human cognition is our ability to go beyond the data and to generate ideas by thinking alone. How is learning by thinking possible? What does this phenomenon tell us about the nature of early mental representations and how they change? To begin to answer these questions, we must first isolate the contributions of our observations from the mechanisms that underlie learning. To this end, my research focuses on a suite of thought-based learning phenomena that are particularly widespread in childhood, including learning by analogy, by explanation, and by engagement in imaginary worlds. I will describe both theoretical and empirical work suggesting that these activities each impose unique, top-down constraints on children’s inferential processes. 

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

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.

___________________________