Textbook: Usha Goswami
Term test mar5th & may9th
[Public information brochure assignment: parent-friendly writing based on academic research]
Syllabus_CPSY610-2026-Jan19.pdf
Lec 1
- [An example of continuous change vs. stagecase change: A growing tree vs. stages of a butterfly]
- [Moravec’s paradox]
- [Demonstration: Systematic mistakes of children]
- Continuum 1: Where does knowledge come from?
- Continuum 2: How is knowledge organized?
Lec 2: Piaget
- Constructivist (in the middle of nativism-empiricism axis)
- Children are active learners.
- Thinking is reducible to the laws of formal logic.
- Starting state
- Perceptual capacities
- Reflexes → bring newborns into active contact with the environment
- Cog dev starts from breast feeding.
- Learning Mechanism
- Domain general.
- Start as biologists. Integrate the idea of biological adaptation.
- Integration of prior knowledge and new evidence
- Assimilation (interpretation) and accomodation (update)
- Work together to reach a new equilibrium
- A stable state of understanding
- Balancing [more] external information and [less] internal representation
- In the sense of using minimal but adequate amount of internal representation. A sense of compression.
- Stages
- Stages are inevitable because of the structure of the environment and not necessarily innate.
- The order does not vary. Ages do.
- Sensorimotor (0-2yos)
- Object knowledge like permanence
- 1st stage. 0-1mos. No object perception.
- 2nd stage. 1-4mos. Visual tracking, grasping, sucking. No reaching.
- 3rd stage. 4-8mos.
- Reaching for only visible objects.
- Failing object permanence in displacement tasks (cover an object with a piece of cloth).
- By around 5mos, infants have enough motor skills for this task (Bower, 1977).
- 4th stage. 8-12mos.
- Reaching for hidden objects. Representational thought.
- 9mos failing A-not-B task (hide in A 5 times, baby searchers in A 5 times, hide in B, baby still searches in A and stops) → cannot maintain location-object paring memory.
- 5th stage. 12-18mos.
- Pretense
- Means-ends behavior
- Preoperational (2-7yos)
- Concrete operational (7-11yos)
- Formal operational
- For the Preoperational, Concrete, and Formal Operational stages, Piaget did not rely solely on his own children. He and his collaborators at the Rousseau Institute interviewed hundreds of school children.
Lec 3: Post-Piaget
- Modern Nativism
- Modularity
- Muller-Lyer Illusion → encapsulated and impenetrable
- Prosopagnosia (face blindness)
- Massive modularity
- Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992) The Psychological Foundations of Culture (co-founded evolutionary psych)
- Dan Sperber (1994) The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations
- Pinker (1997) How the Mind Works
- E.g., “cheater detection module”
- Core Knowledge: Baillargeon, Spelke, Rochel Gelman, Carey
- Modern Empiricism: Connectionism
- [E.g., What do chickens eat? What do cows drink?]
- [Define top-down and bottom-up]
- Take cases that are claimed to be to hard to learn, show a computational possibility of learnability
- U-shape learning curve. E.g., past-tense rule.
- Explanation of A-not-B error
- 8-10mos fail because the latent memory of A (the history of searching in A) wins over the active memory of B
- Theory Theory: Gopnik & Henry ****Wellman