The role of language in transcending core knowledge.

() argues that core knowledge has a unique place in cognitive architecture, between fully perceptual and fully conceptual systems of representation. Here I argue that 's core knowledge is on the perception side of the perception/cognition divide. I discuss some implications of this conclusion for the roles language learning might play in transcending core knowledge.

Infants' representations of michottean triggering events.

The classic Michottean 'launching' event is consistent with a real-world Newtonian elastic collision. Previous research has shown that adult humans distinguish launching events that obey some of the physical constraints on Newtonian elastic collisions from events that do not do so early in visual processing, and that infants do so early in development (< 9 months of age). These include that in a launching event, the speed of the agent can be 3 times faster (or more) than that of the patient but the speed of the patient cannot be detectably greater than the speed of the agent.

Do nonlinguistic creatures deploy mental symbols for logical connectives in reasoning?

Some nonlinguistic systems of representation display of the six features of a language-of-thought (LoT) delineated by Quilty-Dunn et al. But they conjecture something stronger: That all six features cooccur homeostatically in nonlinguistic thought. Here I argue that there is no good evidence for nonlinguistic deductive reasoning involving the disjunctive syllogism.

Minimal representations of possibility at age 3.

Young children do not always consider alternative possibilities when planning. Suppose a prize is hidden in a single occluded container and another prize is hidden in an occluded pair. If given a chance to choose one container and receive its contents, choosing the singleton maximizes expected reward because each member of the pair might be empty.

The development of reasoning by exclusion in infancy.

How do humans develop the capacity to reason? In five studies, we examined infants' emerging ability to make exclusion inferences using negation, as in the disjunctive syllogism (P or Q; not P; therefore Q). Inspired by studies of non-human animals and older children, Experiments 1-3 used an exclusion task adapted from Call's (2004) 2-cup paradigm and Experiments 4-5 used an exclusion task adapted from the blicket detector paradigm (Sobel & Kirkham, 2006). In both tasks, we found failure to make exclusion inferences at 15 months, fragile success at 17 months, and robust success by 20 months of age.

The importance of inference in relational reasoning: Relational matching as a case study.

Nonhuman animals and preschoolers struggle with Relational-Match-to-Sample (RMTS), a classic test of the capacity for second-order relational, analogical, and reasoning. These failures are often explained by limitations in representational or computational capacities. Drawing on recent evidence for robust spontaneous RMTS success (i.

Infants' Attributions of Insides and Animacy in Causal Interactions.

Past work has found that infants show more interest when an object that has at least two properties of animate beings, such as engaging in self-generated motion and having fur, is shown to be hollow than when an object with none or one of these properties is revealed to be hollow. When an object is grabbed by a hand and moved to a new place, by 7 months of age, infants explain the motion of the object as due to the hand, and thus do not interpret this object as capable of self-generated motion. This constant application of force is called an "entraining" event.

You cannot find what you are not looking for: Population differences in relational reasoning are sometimes differences in inductive biases alone.

Relational reasoning is a cornerstone of human cognition. Extensive work, drawing on the Relational Match to Sample paradigm (RMTS), has established that humans, at least above the age of five, are much more proficient relational reasoners than younger children or non-human animals. While sometimes differences between populations derive from differences in capacity (the capacity to create representations in a certain format or of a certain complexity, information processing capacity), other times such differences derive from different learning histories alone.

Parent-focused prevention of adolescent health risk behavior: Study protocol for a multisite cluster-randomized trial implemented in pediatric primary care.

Evidence-based parenting interventions play a crucial role in the sustained reduction of adolescent behavioral health concerns. Guiding Good Choices (GGC) is a 5-session universal anticipatory guidance curriculum for parents of early adolescents that has been shown to reduce substance use, depression symptoms, and delinquent behavior. Although prior research has demonstrated the effectiveness of evidence-based parenting interventions at achieving sustained reductions in adolescent behavioral health concerns, public health impact has been limited by low rates of uptake in community and agency settings.

The Formal Structure of Kind Representations.

Kind representations, concepts like table, triangle, dog, and planet, underlie generic language. Here, we investigate the formal structure of kind representations-the structure that distinguishes kind representations from other types of representations. The present studies confirm that participants distinguish generic-supporting properties of individuals (e.

Age and Species Comparisons of Visual Mental Manipulation Ability as Evidence for its Development and Evolution.

Intelligent behavior is shaped by the abilities to store and manipulate information in visual working memory. Although humans and various non-human animals demonstrate similar storage capacities, the evolution of manipulation ability remains relatively unspecified. To what extent are manipulation limits unique to humans versus shared across species? Here, we compare behavioral signatures of manipulation ability demonstrated by human adults and 6-to-8-year-old children with that of an animal separated from humans by over 300 million years of evolution: a Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus).

The Acquisition of Modal Concepts.

Sometimes we accept propositions, sometimes we reject them, and sometimes we take propositions to be worth considering but not yet established, as merely possible. The result is a complex representation with logical structure. Is the ability to mark propositions as merely possible part of our innate representational toolbox or does it await development, perhaps relying on language acquisition? Several lines of inquiry show that preverbal infants manage possibilities in complex ways, while others find that preschoolers manage possibilities poorly.

Specifying the domain-general resources that contribute to conceptual construction: Evidence from the child's acquisition of vitalist biology.

There are two dissociable processes that underlie knowledge acquisition: knowledge enrichment, which involves learning information that can be represented with one's current conceptual repertoire; and conceptual construction, which involves acquiring knowledge that can only be represented in terms of concepts one does not yet possess. Theory changes involving conceptual change require conceptual construction. The cognitive mechanisms underlying conceptual change are still poorly understood, though executive function capacities have been implicated.

Ontogenetic Origins of Human Integer Representations.

Do children learn number words by associating them with perceptual magnitudes? Recent studies argue that approximate numerical magnitudes play a foundational role in the development of integer concepts. Against this, we argue that approximate number representations fail both empirically and in principle to provide the content required of integer concepts. Instead, we suggest that children's understanding of integer concepts proceeds in two phases.

Real-world size is automatically encoded in preschoolers' object representations.

When adults see a picture of an object, they automatically process how big the object typically is in the real world (Konkle & Oliva, 2012a). How much life experience is needed for this automatic size processing to emerge? Here, we ask whether preschoolers show this same signature of automatic size processing. We showed 3- and 4-year-olds displays with two pictures of objects and asked them to touch the picture that was smaller on the screen.

Infants learn a rule predicated on the relation same but fail to simultaneously learn a rule predicated on the relation different.

In two experiments, we assessed whether infants are able to learn rules predicated on two abstract relations linked by negation: same and different (not same). In an anticipatory looking paradigm, the relation between successive colored geometrical shapes predicted the location where a puppet would appear next. In Experiment 1, 7-month-olds learned and generalized a rule predicated on the relation same, but not a rule predicated on the relation different.

The development of principled connections and kind representations.

Kind representations draw an important distinction between properties that are understood as existing in instances of a kind by virtue of their being the kind of thing they are and properties that are not understood in this manner. For example, the property of barking for the kind dog is understood as being had by dogs by virtue of the fact that they are dogs. These properties are said to have a principled connection to the kind.

The role of domain-general cognitive resources in children's construction of a vitalist theory of biology.

Some episodes of learning are easier than others. Preschoolers can learn certain facts, such as "my grandmother gave me this purse," only after one or two exposures (easy to learn; fast mapping), but they require several years to learn that plants are alive or that the sun is not alive (hard to learn). One difference between the two kinds of knowledge acquisition is that hard cases often require conceptual construction, such as the construction of the biological concept alive, whereas easy cases merely involve forming new beliefs formulated over concepts the child already has (belief revision, a form of knowledge enrichment).

Children's representation of abstract relations in relational/array match-to-sample tasks.

Five experiments compared preschool children's performance to that of adults and of non-human animals on match to sample tasks involving 2-item or 16-item arrays that varied according to their composition of same or different items (Array Match-to-Sample, AMTS). They establish that, like non-human animals in most studies, 3- and 4-year-olds fail 2-item AMTS (the classic relational match to sample task introduced into the literature by Premack, 1983), and that robust success is not observed until age 6. They also establish that 3-year-olds, like non-human animal species, succeed only when they are able to encode stimuli in terms of entropy, a property of an array (namely its internal variability), rather than relations among the individuals in the array (same vs.

Do analog number representations underlie the meanings of young children's verbal numerals?

Children learn to count, and even learn the cardinal meanings of the first three or four verbal numerals ("one" through "three" or "four"), before they master the numerical significance of counting. If so, it follows that the cardinal meanings of those first few numerals cannot be derived, initially, from their place in the count list and the counting routine. What non-verbal representations, then, support the cardinal meanings of verbal numerals before children have mastered how counting does so? Four experiments addressed the commonly adopted assumption that in the earliest period of learning the meanings of number words, children map verbal numerals to regions of the analog number system (ANS), a system of representation with numerical content that is widely attested in animals and in human infants.

Some consequences of normal aging for generating conceptual explanations: A case study of vitalist biology.

Accumulating evidence suggests that not only diseases of old age, but also normal aging, affect elderly adults' ability to draw on the framework theories that structure our abstract causal-explanatory knowledge, knowledge that we use to make sense of the world. One such framework theory, the cross-culturally universal vitalist biology, gives meaning to the abstract concepts life and death. Previous work shows that many elderly adults are animists, claiming that active, moving entities such as the sun and the wind are alive (Zaitchik & Solomon, 2008).

Executive function depletion in children and its impact on theory of mind.

The current studies provide an experimental, rather than correlational, method for testing hypotheses about the role of executive function (EF) in conceptual development. Previous research has established that adults' tendency to deploy EF can be temporarily diminished by use. Exercising self-control in one context decreases adults' performance on other EF demanding tasks immediately thereafter.