Tamar Kushnir, Ph.D. - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Developmental research has shown the profound changes that children's causal knowledge undergoes throughout development. These changes have been identified and thoroughly studied, but the processes and mechanisms behind the changes are still unknown. To better understand the processes involved in developmental change, this proposal examines three sources of causal information - perceptual cues, contingencies, and effects of interventions - and explores how they interact and what they each contribute to the development of causal reasoning in young children. In particular, these studies seek to show that young children pay attention to all three types of information, so that when some information is missing or incomplete, children can use other information to acquire causal knowledge. The first two studies directly contrast perceptual information (spatial contiguity cues) with information about both direct and conditional contingencies in order to observe their relative effects on young children's causal inferences. The third study examines the relative effects of interventions and probabilistic contingency information on adults' causal judgments. The final study looks at the relative effects of interventions and deterministic and probabilistic contingencies on young children's causal judgments. Results of these studies will provide valuable information about the interaction between perception, contingency and intervention underlying the acquisition of causal knowledge, and will help us to understand some of the mechanisms that enable children to learn about the world. [unreadable] [unreadable]

The preschool years are characterized by extraordinary changes in children's causal knowledge; 3- and 4-year-olds have increasingly coherent theories about the way things work, they can reason about hidden causal forces like gravity or germs, and they can rapidly learn causal relations from new evidence. These changes are accompanied by equally remarkable developments in social knowledge -- the understanding of the motivations, emotions, and mental states that drive human behavior. Intuitively, it seems clear that what children know about people can have consequences for what children learn from people. Indeed, studies have shown that, where social information is critical (such as in learning about language or culture), children's social knowledge influences how and what they can learn. However, causal learning doesn't necessarily require social information; children can learn about causal relations from associations between events, or by simply observing the consequences of actions. Thus, children's developing social cognition may have unique and importantly different implications for causal learning than for social learning. To date, these implications have been largely unexplored. This project investigates the influence of preschoolers' developing social knowledge on their causal learning. Specifically, it focuses on their developing understanding of epistemic states -- that some people know more than others, and that people may have different areas of expertise and ability. The first four studies use lab-based experimental methods to address (1) whether, as in other learning domains, preschoolers are sensitive to others' past accuracy in causal learning; (2) whether, in contrast to other learning domains, preschoolers show selective trust of others depending on the type of knowledge and expertise they have; (3) how epistemic information (i.e., that one person knows more than another) interacts with statistical information (i.e., a strong vs. weak correlation) in causal learning; and (4) how epistemic information interacts with information from children's own active causal exploration. All four studies include measures to investigate how developmental and individual differences in social cognition contribute to the process of causal learning. Finally, a fifth classroom-based study combines experimental with observational methods to investigate how preschoolers actively engage with social sources in the process of exploratory causal play.

There is a trend in early childhood education toward increasing direct instruction, thus more emphasis on social transmission in early learning. Research is needed to better enable us to evaluate this trend. To this aim, the results of this research will have implications for both our understanding of basic learning processes in children and our ability to design effective educational environments for them. The results will also deepen our understanding of the unique processes that characterize early casual learning (the foundation for later science education) and distinguish it from learning in other domains. The final classroom-based study explicitly creates a link between basic research and early childhood education, and is expected to lead to further research targeting this link.

In the first few years of life, infants and children rapidly learn about the social world by observing and interacting with the people in their immediate environment. These people are the first source of information as children begin to learn about human behavior and social norms shaping that behavior. The goal of this study is to examine how contextual factors influence the manner in which children interpret the behavioral intentions of others. With a focus on social-cognitive development, this study addresses how children learn about the goals and desires of others and how children learn about the rules and norms of various social groups. In this global age, individuals are increasingly required to understand multiple worldviews. This study will foster skills needed to promote positive social behaviors and sensitivity to the norms and values of different cultural groups in the United States, which, in turn, will reduce harmful stereotyping and misunderstandings.

Understanding the perspectives, norms, and conventions of various individuals will help children develop a better understanding of their own place in the social world. This study investigates the mechanisms underlying the process by which children acquire this understanding. The study also examines cultural differences and similarities in how children interpret intentional actions over the first five years of life. This will be accomplished by tracking emerging developmental changes in understandings of personal and social causes of intentional action at three time points starting in infancy and continuing on to the preschool years. Two cultural groups will be compared: European- and Chinese-Americans. The study also involves examining how infants, toddlers, and preschoolers employ statistical learning mechanisms in interpreting behavior. The methodological approach consists of a critical third party generalization task; this means that having learned about the behaviors (and intentions) of one person, investigators will determine whether infants and children are able to predict the behaviors (and intentions) of an unfamiliar person. A statistical learning measure will be used to determine how infants and children across cultures use statistical information to infer goals and desires of individuals. For example, if a young child grows up in a culture in which actions are governed by common cultural norms and practices as opposed to personal preferences, and thus observes consistency across individuals, that child may learn, over time, that observed intentional actions are frequently generalizable across individuals. In contrast, if a young child grows up in a culture in which actions are frequently expressions of idiosyncratic personal tastes, and thus, observes variability across individuals, then, that child may learn over time that intentional actions are not necessarily generalizable across individuals. Three age groups will be assessed: infants (ages 11-13 months), toddlers (ages 28-32 months) and preschoolers (ages 3-5 years). Central questions posed include: Are children's predictions regarding the intentions of others a function of the sociocultural group to which the children belong? At what age do socioculturally-based inferences begin to surface?

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The Cognitive Development Society (CDS) was founded in 1999 with the goal of providing an intellectual gathering point for researchers who focus on the development of cognitive abilities. CDS members are united by a common focus on the developmental origins of perceiving, thinking and learning, and they are also united in the enterprise of bringing varied perspectives and approaches to bear on understanding these processes. Their research addresses developmental time points across the lifespan, and focuses on multi-level biological, behavioral, social and cultural processes shaping the development of cognitive abilities. Because bringing together diverse perspectives and approaches is fundamental to making progress in scientific understanding, CDS has sought to increase diversity in its membership. The CDS seeks to promote the attendance, at its 2019 meeting, of junior scholars (e.g., graduate students, post-docs) from groups traditionally underrepresented in the developmental sciences. At the conference, these scholars will present their research and participate in a mentoring program which involves pairing them with senior researchers in the field.

The present award will increase the diversity of the CDS membership through several mechanisms. The first of these involves providing travel awards for junior scholars from underrepresented groups. The second involves continuing the society's mentoring program in which young scholars are paired with an established researcher. Through an organized meeting at the start of the conference with their mentors, mentees will have the opportunity to begin forging new professional relationships, thereby broadening their academic networks. Mentors will support their mentees by attending the junior scholars' presentations in order to provide support and feedback. The third involves facilitating networking events for junior scholars from this year's (2019) cohort and former recipients of the CDS Diversity Travel Awards from the 2015 and 2017 meetings. Together, these experiences are designed to promote the success of junior scholars from diverse backgrounds as both conference participants and as future independent investigators. Anonymous feedback from the junior scholars and their mentors following the 2019 meeting will help ensure that CDS can improve upon the effectiveness of its travel awards in achieving its goal of increasing the involvement of scholars traditionally underrepresented in the field.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.