ABSTRACTS � Lectures, Symposia, and Workshops

Cognitive Development Society
Chapel Hill, NC, October 8-9, 1999

Acknowledgments: This meeting is being supported with funds from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We also thank the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology, and Center for Developmental Science for their support. Pat Taylor�s diligent, thoughtful and cheerful efforts have kept this meeting on track. Finally, we have received generous contributions from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, The Taylor and Francis Group, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Harvard University Press, and The MIT Press.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

Development of Intuitions about Mental Experiences. John Flavell, Stanford University

A rough distinction can be made between more or less enduring, disposition-like mental states, such as beliefs and attitudes, and more transient, here-and -now-occurring conscious mental acts and experiences, such as having a sudden thought, memory, percept, or feeling. Much of the research in the area of theory of mind has dealt with children's developing understanding of mental phenomena of the former, state-like type. In contrast, our recent research has explored the development of children's knowledge about mental experiences, especially thinking, attention, and consciousness.

Emergentism in Cognitive Development. Nora Newcombe, Temple University

Disillusion with specific aspects of Piagetian theory has led many investigators to be pessimistic about the possibilities of an interactionist-emergentist approach to cognitive development. In particular, strong nativist hypotheses regarding cognitive development have attracted much interest over the past decade or more. In this talk, I will give some reasons to question specific nativist hypotheses, and will propose that an interactionist-emergentist approach to cognitive development remains a viable and even attractive theoretical option. The empirical examples that give substance to this argument will be drawn largely but not exclusively from the domains of spatial and quantitative development.

Psychological Studies of Experiential Canalization and Malleability of Species-Specific Auditory Perception in Ducklings. Gilbert Gottlieb, Center for Developmental Science, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mallard ducklings that have been hatched in incubators and not previously exposed to maternal stimulation show a preference for the mallard maternal assembly call over the maternal calls of other species. This preference is the result of experiential canalization, i.e., exposure to their own embryonic vocalizations while still in the egg. When embryos are surgically muted they do not show their usual preference for the mallard maternal call after hatching. Taking the embryonic experience of their voice away also makes the ducklings susceptible to developing preferences for the maternal calls of other species (=malleability). Surprisingly, vocally intact ducklings become malleable under social conditions that allow them to have tactile contact with each other. Malleability is psychologically mediated by low arousal level.

What Can Genetic Disorders Tell Us About Normal Cognitive Development? Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Neurocognitive Development Unit, Institute of Child Health, UCL, London

It is frequently assumed that cognitive dissociations found in genetic disorders reveal innately specified cognitive modules. This is similar to the use of neuropsychological cases to make claims about the independence of processing streams in adult brains. I will argue that the logic of this assumption is flawed, by the very fact that it fails to take into account the process of development itself. Comparing the infant and steady state cognitive phenotypes of Williams syndrome and Down syndrome, I will show that atypical development cannot be simply mapped onto the normal case. The crucial theoretical contribution of the study of genetic disorders doesn't lie in pointing to impaired or intact innately specified modules.
Rather, studies of atypically developing children reinforce our need to focus on how cognitive modules result from the dynamic processes of ontogeny, not directly from evolution.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1999

SYMPOSIUM: Theory of Mind and Executive Function. Organized by Josef Perner

Our objective is to show that observed correlations between theory of mind development and mastery of executive tasks around the age of 4 years cut deeper than mere performance demands shared by the tasks used and that these correlations pose a theoretical challenge of how to explain them. Several alternative theories will be presented and their clinical importance for children with persisting self-control problems at a later age (e.g., ADHD) highlighted.

Theory of Mind and Executive Inhibition: A Functional Relationship. Josef Perner, University of Salzburg, Austria

Data are presented to show that versions of the false belief task without executive inhibition component correlate strongly with executive function tasks. This rules out the most plausible explanation that theory of mind tasks correlate with executive function tasks because theory of mind tasks require executive inhibition. Several alternative theories to explain this relationship are presented and their general importance for cognitive development is outlined.

Deficits in Theory of Mind and Executive Function in �Hard to Manage� Preschoolers: Are They Related? Claire Hughes, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK

By screening 910 children from nurseries in South London 40 children rated by parents above the 90th percentile for hyperactivity (H2M) were selected and tested at three time points: 4-, 5- and 6 years. At ages 4 and 5 the H2M group performed less well than age matched controls on both ToM and EF tasks, and showed more antisocial behaviour in peer-play. Antisocial behaviour was negatively associated with EF performance, but not with ToM performance or VIQ. When group differences in VIQ were taken into account, the group contrasts in ToM and EF were attenuated; the association between ToM and EF was also attenuated for the control group, but not for the H2M group - suggesting qualitative group differences in this relation.

Theory of Mind, Executive Function and Social Competence in Boys with ADHD. Tony Charman, Institute of Child Health, University College London, UK

The performance of boys with a diagnosis of ADHD was compared to that of typically-developing boys on an advanced theory of mind task and on two tasks measuring aspects of executive function. There were no differences between the groups on the advanced theory of mind measure. The children with ADHD scored more poorly than controls on an inhibition task but not on a planning task once age and IQ had been covaried. Performance on the executive and theory of mind tasks was weakly correlated for the typically-developing boys but not for the boys with ADHD. The results are discussed in terms of inhibitory and social information processing accounts of ADHD.

Self-Reflection and the Executive Functions of Language. Phil Zelazo, University of Toronto, Canada

In this presentation, I will review recent data that bear on theoretical models of the relation between EF and ToM, and I will consider the instrumental roles that language may play in the development of both EF and ToM.

WORKSHOP: The Use of Event-Related Potential in the Study of Cognitive Development

Charles A. Nelson, University of Minnesota

Increased interest in charting the development of brain-behavior relations in the context of cognitive development brings with it the challenge of identifying suitable methods for studying our species young. Functional imaging tools such as fMRI are ideal for studying children older than age 6, although this technique is not widely available and remains expensive. In contrast, the recording of the brain's electrical activity remains a widely available, relatively inexpensive technique that can be used across the entire life span. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to how the recording of event-related potentials can be used to study a range of cognitive phenomena in infants and children. The use of conventional, "low-density" ERP techniques will be described along with more recent "high-density" approaches. Should time permit, the advantages and disadvantages of ERPs vs. fMRI will be described.

SYMPOSIUM: On the Road to Language: How Infants Make Sense of Linguistic Input. Organized by Peter Jusczyk

How Sensitivity to Rhythm Helps Infants Learn Native Language Sound Organization. Peter W. Jusczyk, Johns Hopkins University

From birth, infants display much sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of language. Their sensitivity to the rhythms of language figures prominently in their ability to distinguish utterances in their native language from those of another language. Moreover, attention to rhythmic properties of the native language seems to play an important role in the acquisition of other aspects of native language sound organization. For example, sensitivity to rhythmic properties of utterances appears to provide the foundation for infants' abilities to segment words from fluent speech. We will discuss some recent findings concerning how infants' sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of the native language develops and consider their implications for understanding language acquisition.

Acquisition of Language-Specific Rhythm: The Case of Mora-Based Rhythm in Japanese. Reiko Mazuka, Duke University

In this talk, I will discuss data from a study of how basic rhythm patterns emerge in Japanese children's acquisition of the language. Unlike English's stress-timed rhythms, Japanese employs mora-timed rhythmic patterns. In the present study, we analyzed the speech of Japanese child-directed speech, and found that the majority of CDS vocabulary had distinct phonological form. A typical Japanese CDS vocabulary has a heavy-light sequence of syllables, although these are not as high frequency in adult Japanese vocabulary. When we presented these to Japanese infants, we found that they preferred listening to CDS vocabulary over words with other forms. On the basis of these data, we will discuss a possible scenario in which Japanese infants start out preferring a syllable-based rhythm, and later shift to a more adult-like, mora-timed rhythm.

Rapprochements Between Infant Speech Perception, Concept Development and the Acquisition of Word Meaning. Sandra R. Waxman, Northwestern University

The past several years have witnessed an exciting rapprochement between research on infant speech perception, concept development, and the acquisition of word meaning. Research in speech perception has begun to identify the cues that infants use to distinguish among various types of words (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) in the input. At the same time, research in early word learning has begun to trace the evolution of infants' abilities to map theses various types of words appropriately to meaning. The evidence converges to suggest that infants begin the process of acquisition with very general expectations linking types of words to their meaning, and that these are subsequently fine-tuned as a function of experience with the native language under acquisition. These expectations facilitate both early language and conceptual development.

WORKSHOP: Research Funding in Cognitive Development

Organized by Daniel B. Berch

The goals of this workshop are to provide information concerning: 1) various types of funding opportunities that are likely to be of interest to cognitive development researchers; and 2) procedures for submitting grant applications.

Daniel B. Berch U.S. Department of Education
Melinda Bier, James S. McDonnell Foundation
Eleni Makris, Spencer Foundation
Diane Scott-Jones, National Science Foundation
Howard S. Kurtzman, National Institute of Mental Health
Margaret Feerick, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Sarah H. Broman, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
Herbert Weingartner, National Institute on Drug Abuse

SYMPOSIUM: Beyond the Child as Scientist or Scientist as Child: The Development of Scientific Reasoning Processes. Organized by David Klahr

Ever since Piaget's pioneering investigations of children�s exploration and understanding of fundamental scientific entities such as space, time, quantity, number, life and probability, developmentalists have been intrigued with the notion of "the child as scientist". Some researchers, noting the striking similarities between the fundamental goals of science and children's efforts to understand the world about them, have concluded that children's thinking in this vein bears many of the hallmarks of scientific thinking. Indeed, a recent volume entitled "The Scientist in the Crib" exemplifies one end of the child-as-scientist spectrum. Other researchers, also influenced by Piaget, but more by his stage theory than by his empirical studies, have concluded that the early mental structures of cognitive development, as characterized by Piaget, render it impossible for children to think "scientifically" before their teens, at the earliest. A different perspective on this issue comes from those who lament the purported decline in children's wonder and curiosity about the world around them. Only for the fortunate few who wind up as scientists does such "childlike" thinking remain active. Under this view, the issue is how to best characterize the Scientist as Child. In an attempt to get beyond these vague and mutually inconsistent -- albeit appealing --analogies, the four presentations in this symposium will look at the development of scientific reasoning processes from several perspectives. The goal is to better characterize just what scientific reasoning really is, and how it develops.

Sifting Through Masses of Observational Data: Children and Professional Astronomers. Christian D. Schunn, Susan Trickett, Greg Trafton, & Georgia Seeley; George Mason University

Contrasts between children and scientists have tended to focus on the way they generate experiments or the way they select among theories given data, in contrast to the way they analyze rich data sets. We present results from an in vivo study of astronomers analyzing a data set for the first time. Using speech and gesture data, we describe the systematicity with which the astronomers sift through the data, the way they treat unexpected data, and the way knowledge moves into a formal conceptual form over time. We conclude with links to existing studies of child performance in related tasks.


The Epistemology of Authentic Scientific Research. Clark A. Chinn & Betina A. Malhotra, Rutgers University

We contrast "authentic" scientific reasoning with the reasoning needed to perform tasks commonly used by psychologists to study scientific thinking in the laboratory. These latter types of investigations usually involve simple multivariate tasks. We argue that the mental models that underlie simple tasks are qualitatively different from those that underlie authentic scientific research and that these differences imply basic differences in the cognitive processes needed to reason with the two types of models. These differences in cognitive processes, in turn, suggest fundamental epistemological differences between authentic scientific research and simple multivariate tasks.

Scientific Reasoning as Modeling: The Development of Representational Competence. Richard Lehrer & Leona Schauble, University of Wisconsin

The developmental literature on scientific reasoning emphasizes how people discover the structure (e.g., patterns of covariation, rules) in situations. In contrast, scientists participate in modeling practices. Models are regarded as evolving within extended programs of inquiry and argument, not as Platonic structures awaiting discovery. Moreover, it is assumed that there are alternative ways of modeling the same situation; a model's adequacy depends upon the purpose being pursued. We will discuss the development of modeling practices in elementary school students and suggest that the development of scientific reasoning cannot be understood apart from an adequate account of the context and practices where it is supported and fostered.

A Framework for Assessing the Developmental Course of Scientific Reasoning Skills. David Klahr, Carnegie Mellon University

Absent a clear specification of just what scientific thinking is, it is impossible to decide the extent to which children do or don't exhibit the "essential" properties of that type of thought. In order to make a sensible evaluation of the child-as-scientist issue we need both a detailed specification of what scientific thinking is, and equally detailed and well-specified operationalization of the various components of that model. Only then will we be able to chart the developmental course of each of these components as well as their integration into the overall scientific discovery process.

SYMPOSIUM: Feminist Epistemology and Cognitive Development: Sharing a Context. Organized by Ellin K. Scholnick and Patricia H. Miller

Cognitive developmentalists have been interested in the same questions that have engaged epistemologists, "What is the origin of knowledge of the self, the other, and the world?" "What form does knowledge take?" "What causes changes in knowledge?" To answer these questions both developmentalists and philosophers have drawn on the same ontological and epistemological perspective, a perspective that feminist epistemologists have critiqued. This symposium examines the implications of that critique for understanding the nature of cognition and how it develops and applies the critique to such research areas as interpersonal understanding, memory, and cognitive categories.

Feminist. Thought @Development.Cog. Patricia H. Miller, University of Florida

Feminist epistemologies provide several concepts that can enrich developmental models of cognition. Key concepts include the pervasiveness of gendering in social products, the situatedness of thinking, interconnected thinking, the influence of power differentials on knowledge, epistemological communities, and epistemological diversity. Specific concepts such as "double vision" and "the other" are also discussed in terms of their relevance to cognitive development.

Knowledge Is Power. Ellin K. Scholnick, University of Maryland

In the popular press feminism is a political stance. In the academy, diverse feminist analyses examine the political processes that shape the daily life of individuals and the knowledge they produce. Why are these analyses relevant to investigators who are interested in the nature of knowledge and the process of its acquisition? Just as contemporary feminism has given rise to different views on the way gender influences scholarship, developmental psychologists have used different aspects of feminist theories to explore aspects of the nature of gender, the nature of knowledge, and the way each of these is the producer and product of power relations. I discuss four uses of feminist theory: studying gender as an individual difference, making the developmental concepts more inclusive, modeling cognitive development on feminist epistemology, and linking knowledge and power.

Voice and Silence: Feminist Perspectives on Autobiography. Robyn Fivush, Emory University

In this paper, I outline a model of autobiography based on feminist concepts of power and context. Specifically power is discussed in terms of "voice" and "silence" and this idea is further developed to explore who has the power to give voice or to silence. This analysis leads to conceptualizing autobiography along the dimensions of voice and silence and self and other, yielding four quadrants: self-voice, other-voice, self-silence and other-silence. Implications of this model for understanding autobiographical memory are discussed.

Entering a Community of Minds: "Theory of Mind" From a Feminist Perspective. Katherine Nelson, Graduate Center CUNY

What might feminist epistemologies offer to research in cognitive development? Some principles that are expressed in feminist are also incorporated into socio-cultural, experiential, contextual and related approaches to developmental theory. In particular, relational knowledge, experientially -based knowledge, socially situated knowledge, and embodied knowledge are relevant to our concerns. Additionally, issues of power play an important role in our research with children. These concerns are addressed as they contrast with foundations of research derived from traditional cognitive science methods and theory in the context of children�s theory of mind. An alternative approach in the form of "psychological pragmatics" is proposed.

SYMPOSIUM: Dynamic Organization of Memory and Emotion. Organized by Nancy L. Stein

The purpose of this symposium is to discuss the development of memories for emotional events. Although the study of memory systems has been in the forefront of cognitive development for quite some time, until recently, memory for everyday, emotional, and personally significant events was not considered in any systematic way. The symposium participants will consider and discuss issues that relate to memory for emotional events. In particular, we will focus on the nature and definition of emotional memories, the early emergence of skill that allows a rapid understanding of emotional situations, the necessity to study encoding, different theoretical perspectives on memories for emotional events, and advances that are needed in the field of memory and development.

Issues in the Study of Memory and Emotion: Approach and Avoidance. Patricia J. Bauer, University of Minnesota

The field of memory development research has many issues. In this talk, I will focus on three that the field seems hesitant to approach yet is unable to avoid: "Into how many different mnemonic categories
shall we place the registration of experience?", "How seriously shall we take the role of the brain in memory?", and "How much attention shall we pay to the noise (individual differences) in the signal of our data?" Particularly as we approach the study of the dynamic organization of memory and emotion, these issues are unavoidable.

The Representation, Emergence, and Accuracy of Memory for Emotional Events: Implications for Theories of Development and Learning. Nancy L. Stein, University of Chicago

A theory of emotional memory will be presented, and an argument will be made for the early and rapid development of memory for personally significant events. Emotional memories are organized around success or failure of personally meaningful goals. Although inaccuracies in these memories can readily occur, so, too, can de tallied accuracy result. The ways in which events are encoded, the importance of the goal, the intensity of the experience, and the continuing nature of the event are all critical in predicting both the content and accuracy of emotional memory.


Toward a Developmental Analysis of Remembering Salient Events. Peter A. Ornstein, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The issues raised by Drs. Stein and Bauer will be discussed in the context of emerging perspective on children's memory for salient experiences. From this point of view, memory for an experience begins with knowledge-driven processes that are initiated as the event unfolds. Expectation and prior knowledge affect children's understanding and encoding, and hence the establishment of a representation in memory, but so does information provided by parents and others who are present as events are experienced. Importantly, these encoding processes are not restricted to the duration of a "stimulus event," but rather must be viewed as being extended in time and determined by both endogenous and exogenous factors. Subsequent remembering is influenced markedly by the status of the resulting representation that has been constructed, but the representation itself is seen as being quite malleable. This perspective on children's memory will then be related to three "tasks" that seem central to any developmental analysis of remembering: (a) making cognitive "diagnoses," (b) mapping age-related changes (and constancies), and (c) searching for mediators of developmental change.

WORKSHOP: Recent Advances in Growth Curve Modeling: Applications in Developmental Science. Patrick J. Curran & Kenneth A. Bollen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Presented by Patrick J. Curran)

Longitudinal data analysis has long played an important role in empirical studies of individual development. However, recent advances in statistics and computing have resulted in a variety of powerful new analytical techniques for studying individual differences in change over time. Most notable of these are a group of methods called "growth curve models" in which trajectories are fit to each individual, and variability in these trajectories is modeled as a function of one or more explanatory variables. The goal of this workshop is to provide a comprehensive introduction to growth curve modeling, particularly as it is applied in studies of individual development over time. A detailed example using developmental data will be presented to highlight various aspects of this modeling strategy, and recommendations will be made for utilizing these techniques within various applied research settings.