David Rakison - US grants

A three-day symposium, to be held June 7-9, 2002, will bring together leading researchers in the fields of cognitive development, visual perception, language acquisition, developmental neuroscience, and computational modeling to address key questions about the nature of category representations and the mechanisms that produce them. Speakers will focus on how children build object categories, beginning with the basic architecture of the brain and with the constraints or biases that provide the foundation of early perceptual experience. These developments will be considered in the light of subsequent growth of categorical and semantic abilities. Research will be presented that examines three interrelated themes: (1) fundamental processes by which children are able to individuate and categorize objects and their physical properties; (2) ways in which language transforms children's emerging categories and the selection of features relevant for object categorization; and (3) higher-level cognitive processes that guide the formation of coherent systems of category knowledge. The aim is to encourage the exchange of ideas, to synthesize the field's progress, and to build links to broader theoretical concerns. An additional aim is to contribute to the development of junior scientists and students. To this end, an invited cohort of promising young scholars will attend the meeting and interact with the speakers in an accessible and facilitating setting. A final aim of the symposium is to provide early childhood educators and clinicians with practical information about the way that infants perceive and learn about objects in the world. This knowledge may serve as a valuable tool for assessing aberrant development in at-risk infants in the earliest stages of life. The results of the symposium will be published as the 32nd in the series of Carnegie Cognition Symposium volumes.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): All species face adaptive problems that need to be solved in order for an organism to survive an reproduce. One of most important adaptive problems that species must overcome is predator avoidance because an organism cannot pass its genes to the next generation if it is killed. Despite a significant database concerning the presence of predator detection and predator response mechanisms in non-human animals, there is a dearth of evidence regarding how they might operate in humans. The current proposal focuses on this issue by investigating the existence of predator detection mechanisms in young infants. The main hypothesis of the proposed studies is that infants possess a psychological mechanism that provides a perceptual template, or minimal representational description, of animals that were threats to our hominid ancestors - in particular, snakes and spiders. The proposal brings together diverse methodologies to examine this question. One series of studies will examine whether neonates and young infants preferentially orient toward schematic and real-images of spiders and snakes. The relative contributions of cortical and subcortical structures to these behaviors will also be explored. A second series of studies will use the familiarization procedure to provide converging evidence by investigating whether young infants categorize dangerous animals as equivalent and as different from non-threatening animals. This approach to a core question in cognitive science represents a new discipline of scientific endeavor in developmental evolutionary psychology. The results will shed light on the role of innate and learned mechanisms in human behavior and will have relevance to cognition, development, evolutionary psychology, clinical psychology, and neuroscience.

This conference brings together leading researchers to address both the historical roots of the information-processing approach and its future direction in the study of infant perception and cognition. One important emphasis of this conference, to be held as a preconference to the International Conference on Infant Studies on March 26th, 2007, is its exploration of the underlying processes that explain developmental change from infancy to childhood. By focusing on a single theoretical perspective, the conference allows its participants to view how the information-processing approach can address development across a number of important and diverse domains, such as infant attention, object perception, face processing, spatial cognition, object categorization, and symbolic understanding. A number of leading researchers will address the future directions of the field, some of whom will outline innovative methodological approaches, while others link the historical roots of this approach to its future directions. The uniqueness of the conference is in linking many diverse areas of cognition under one theoretical framework. The conference is also intended to recognize the contribution of Leslie B. Cohen, both theoretically and methodologically, in advancing the understanding of infant perception and cognition.

The small conference will facilitate interactions among researchers, many of whom may not usually exchange ideas because they focus on different aspects of infant perceptual and cognitive development. An important component of the conference is providing support for young investigators (graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty) to attend the conference and participate in discussions via travel awards. The smaller size of the conference will provide an intimate arena for interaction among leading researchers and young investigators alike, with the goal of serving as a catalyst for forging collaborations among more experienced as well as junior investigators, and engendering new ideas about the future direction of the field. The presentations of each invited speaker will be published in an edited volume by Oxford University Press, which will allow dissemination of the presentations and findings to a broader audience.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One of the most well known communication and social deficits exhibited by children and adults with autism is the inability to mentalize or make inferences about what others know, believe, think, and feel, which renders them to operate socially in the "blind" (Baron-Cohen), 1995, Tager-Flusberg, 2001). Although researchers have attempted to discover which specific deficit or deficits cause this "mindblindness", its basis remains in open question. The current proposal focuses on the issue by investigating whether deficits in theory of mind in young children with autism stem from an inability to form concepts for animates an inanimates. The main hypothesis of the proposed studies is that young children with autism may have difficulties in encoding goal-directed action, which is generally considered a crucial precursor to theory of mind. To examine this question, the proposal uses the inductive generalization of generalized imitation procedure with typically developing infants and young children ad well as young children with autism. One study will examine whether young children with autism understand that animals and not vehicles are goal-directed. A second and third study will examine on what basis young children with autism and typically developing infants and young children generalize goal-directed behavior to animals and not vehicles (e.g., surface features such as eyes or legs versus category membership). The findings will have relevance to cognition, development, clinical psychology, and neuroscience, and they will have potential implication for early diagnosis of autism as well as for targeting specific deficits in intervention with the goal of improving social functioning. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

The ability to categorize objects--such as dogs, cats, cars, furniture and people--is one of the foundations of early perceptual and cognitive development. Many of the objects in these categories tend to have features that co-occur together, such that things that have wings and beaks tend also to have claws and lay eggs. It is now well established that infants in the first year of life are adept at learning such co-occurrences among static non-moving features, and by the second year of life they can do so for dynamic features involved in motion (e.g., things with legs walk and things with wheels roll). It remains to be seen if infants are able to learn about such co-occurring features if they are rarely, if ever, observed together. This ability is important because it is impossible for infants to observe every feature of an object at the same time, and consequently they must generalize from their experience to develop expectations about unseen features of objects. The research supported by the award will use the infant-controlled habituation method to address this issue by examining whether infants and young children between 18 and 26 months of age are able to learn that objects that move in different ways tend to have a co-occurring object part even though they never experience the motion and the part together. In other words, if infants and young children learn that objects with legs walk and that things with legs have eyes, will they infer that things with eyes walk?

The findings will be of direct relevance to developmental psychology. The results will help researchers to understand how infants and young children learn about the complex features of object categories in the world, and they will demonstrate that children possess a potentially powerful--but as yet unexplored--way to generalize their knowledge in the first years of life. The project also has the potential for practical application for early educators because it could help to elucidate a completely novel way to teach young children how to make broader generalizations from limited data. This is important because classroom activities aim to promote the transfer of knowledge from the original instructional context and the kind of learning examined in this work may help to enable this transfer automatically. In a similar vein, it is also feasible to use the limits of this kind of learning to predict which math and science problems are likely to pose difficulty to children when entering school. In addition to the practical benefits for society, the proposed work will provide an outstanding training opportunity for undergraduate students to gain extensive one-on-one experience in conducting scientific research that will prepare them for graduate programs, and potentially, a career in science or education.