Cognitive development
Przemek Tomalski
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development
Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Office: Room 103
email: tomalski@mac.com
Course outline
1. Introduction. Key concepts and theories of cognitive
development.
2. Interactions with the physical world. Perception and
object cognition.
3. Conceptual development.
4. Memory.
5. Reasoning and problem solving. Executive functions.
6. Language.
7. Summary. Looking at cognitive development from
different perspectives.
Interactions with
Physical world II
Newborns Imitate!
• Meltzoff & More (1983) tested the ability of
newborns (aged 1 hour to 3 days old) to
imitate simple behaviours of an adult
demonstrator (tongue protrusion, mouth
opening, lip pursing)
• they discovered significantly higher frequency
of imitating these behaviours by newborns
immediately after demonstration compared
with a control group
Perception of causality
• Infants early on attribute causality to
various kinds of reasons and causes
• Agency - mechanical vs. human agency
• Animacy - 3 month olds prefer ‘animate’
motion (change of trajectory) than
‘mechanical’ (straight line trajectory, gradual
decrease of speed)
Infants attribute agency
• 7 month olds distinguish between inanimate
motion and animate (human agent-induced)
motion
• Meltzoff (1995) showed that 18 month olds can
understand causal intentions to act in a certain way
of another adult and imitate effectively the action
• Meltzoff suggests 2 different systems for
understanding causality by 18 months of age:
physical causality vs. psychological causality
Intentional stance
• ‘intentional stance’ (also known as
‘teleological stance’) - interpreting an action
or event as a goal-directed behaviour
• Gergely et al. (1995) - 12 month old infants
can interpret events as rational (in other
words - efficient) actions directed by a
specific goal
• Habituation event
• Habituation event
(control group)
• Test events for
both groups:
• Test event 1
• Test event II
Baby arithmetic
• Coo