This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Nature and Extent of Children’s Involvement in ‘the Other Half’ of Education Some Problems with Jung's Account of ‘the Other Half’ of Education Conclusion Notes References.

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head‐noun in semantically non‐reversible ORCs (“The book that the boy is reading”). In two eye‐tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., “Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing”). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5–6;4) (...) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head‐noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head‐nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head‐noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., “where is the tractor that the car is following”) to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity‐based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short‐term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1. (shrink)

Young children often treat robots as social agents after they have witnessed interactions that can be interpreted as social. We studied in three experiments whether four-year-olds from three cultures and adults from two cultures will attribute ownership of objects to a robot that engages in social gaze with a human. Participants watched videos of robot-human interactions, in which objects were possessed or new objects were created. Children and adults applied the same ownership rules to humans and robots – (...) irrespective of whether the robot engaged in social gaze or not. However, there was cultural variation in the types of ownership rules used. In Experiment 3, we removed further social cues, finding that just showing a pair of self-propelled robot-arms elicited ownership attributions. The role of social gaze in social attributions to robots and cross-cultural differences in ownership understanding are discussed. (shrink)

Adults report that moral characteristics—particularly widely shared moral beliefs—are central to identity. This perception appears driven by the view that changes to widely shared moral beliefs would alter friendships and that this change in social relationships would, in turn, alter an individual's personal identity. Because reasoning about identity changes substantially during adolescence, the current work tested pre- and post-adolescents to reveal the role that such changes could play in moral cognition. Experiment 1 showed that 8- to 10-year-olds, like (...) class='Hi'>adults, judged that people would change more after changes to their widely shared moral beliefs (e.g., whether hitting is wrong) than after changes to controversial moral beliefs (e.g., whether telling prosocial lies is wrong). Following up on this basic effect, a second experiment examined whether participants regard all changes to widely shared moral beliefs as equally impactful. Adults, but not children, reported that individuals would change more if their good moral beliefs (e.g., it is not okay to hit) transformed into bad moral beliefs (e.g., it is okay to hit) than if the opposite change occurred. This difference in adults was mediated by perceptions of how much changes to each type of belief would alter friendships. We discuss implications for moral judgment and social cognitive development. (shrink)

Why are children better language learners than adults despite being worse at a range of other cognitive tasks? Here, we explore the role of multiword sequences in explaining L1–L2 differences in learning. In particular, we propose that children and adults differ in their reliance on such multiword units in learning, and that this difference affects learning strategies and outcomes, and leads to difficulty in learning certain grammatical relations. In the first part, we review recent findings that suggest that (...) MWUs play a facilitative role in learning. We then discuss the implications of these findings for L1–L2 differences: We hypothesize that adults are both less likely to extract MWUs and less capable of benefiting from them in the process of learning. In the next section, we draw on psycholinguistic, developmental, and computational findings to support these predictions. We end with a discussion of the relation between this proposal and other accounts of L1–L2 difficulty. (shrink)

Picture books are often part of children's socialisation processes, contributing to the children forming images of the world, including ideas about (categories of) people, such as nurses. The study aims to explore how nurses/nursing are portrayed in children's picture books in a Swedish context. Through a systematic search, 44 books were included for analysis using thematic analysis and a theoretical lens inspired by Goffman. The results were presented in three themes: ‘The costume characterised and designated nurses’, ‘Nurses and nursing (...) were defined through specific activities and accessories’, and ‘Nurses’ role as caregivers and decency practitioners'. The results showed that nurses were depicted/described in varied contexts, performing their roles mainly front stage in ‘hands‐on work’ in close contact with patients and relatives. Nurses were attributed different accessories and personality characteristics. Nurses/nursing were generally set within a healthcare context, oftentimes within an overarching medical logic. Historical depictions of nurses' uniforms still appeared as a signifier for nurses/nursing. The presentation of nurses/nursing might have potential implications on children's understanding of and for reputations of nurses/nursing in the long term as primary socialisation and related understandings of the (sub)world(s) are deeply rooted in humans. (shrink)

According to a widely shared view, experience plays only a limited role in children's acquisition of the capacity to pass the false belief test: at most, it facilitates or attunes the development of mindreading abilities from infancy to early childhood. Against the facilitation—and also the maturation—hypothesis, I report empirical data attesting that children and even adults never come to understand false beliefs when deprived of proper social and linguistic interaction. In contrast to the attunement hypothesis, I argue that alleged (...) mindreading abilities in infancy differ significantly from those required to pass the false belief test at age four. I conclude that children's success in the false belief test reflects the acquisition of a novel psychological competence, and argue that social experience in the form of conversation about mental states teaches children to exploit belief reports to predict intelligent behaviour, and induces their acquisition of a capacity to recognize and track others' beliefs across contexts. (shrink)

Childhood maltreatment is widespread in predominantly Muslim countries. However, the research investigating the impact of childhood maltreatment on the adult survivors’ religious and spiritual lives has mainly focused on Western Judeo-Christian samples. Considering cross-cultural differences in religious beliefs, in this study, we investigated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and god image, and the mediating role of self-esteem in a sample of Muslim Turkish adults. Eight hundred two participants completed Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form, God Perception Scale, and Self-Esteem Scale. Findings (...) revealed that all childhood maltreatment subtypes predicted negative image of god and self-esteem mediated some of the negative effects of each maltreatment subtype on god image. The study also found that emotional neglect was the most prominent predictor of negative image of god, followed by emotional abuse. Based on attachment theory, we concluded that the emotional component of childhood maltreatment had more long-lasting adverse consequences in survivors’s relationship with god in Muslim adults. (shrink)

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life as it is a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference (...) source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts: ¿ Being a child ¿ Childhood and moral status ¿ Parents and children ¿ Children in society ¿ Children and the state. Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults¿ rights? What gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disabilility in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children, and what values should inform such practices? What is a good school? How are children¿s lives affected by being taken into social care? The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology. (shrink)

The image of Baba Yaga in the folk culture of the ancient Slavs is considered as an object of research in this work. As an important part of folk culture, Russian folk tales take upon themselves the responsibility to broadcast traditional moral qualities and form the basis of a person's evaluative and emotional attitude to the world. The subject of the study is the transformation and interpretation of the image of Baba Yaga performed by the People's Artist of the RSFSR (...) Georgy Millar in the film tales directed by Alexander Rowe. The authors set a goal to identify specific features in the interpretations of the image of Baba Yaga by George Millar and to identify the typology of these images. The methodological basis of the article is content analysis, comparative, statistical, historical and cultural analysis of the films narrator Alexander Rowe. The authors, when considering the problem, achieve the following results: Georgy Millar starred in 16 Alexander Rowe's fairy tales, while performing 27 roles; he played Baba Yaga in 4 fairy tales; only the first is the canonical image, the other three images are the personal merit of Georgy Millar. In the process of developing the problem, the authors identify comparative criteria of Baba Yaga images: external features, behavioral characteristics, character traits. The novelty of the research consists in the unconventionality of the indicated approach, as well as in a comprehensive analysis of the palette of creative possibilities of actor Georgy Millar. As a result of the study, the authors come to the following conclusions: 1) the centuries-old image of Baba Yaga is very complex and often contradictory, so it can be transformed and interpreted; 2) Georgy Millar created 4 different images of the same character - Baba Yaga "Witch", Baba Yaga "Old Housewife", Baba Yaga "Mother" and Baba Yaga "The lady.". (shrink)

This article explores the socio-discursive competence of young children in Galician pre-schools. In particular, it deals with the way in which children – aged from 2;10 to 4;05 years – combine embodied actions and verbal resources to co-narrate stories with peers and adults. Using an audiovisual corpus of naturally occurring interactions, we have conducted a qualitative and multimodal analysis, observing how children react to diverse footings and negotiate participation frameworks in multiparty interactions. The findings suggest three progressive stages in (...) the development of socio-discursive competence in which children use different strategies: the stage of interactive proto-narrations, the stage of collaborative narrations and the stage of polyphonic monologue narrations. Our detailed examination reveals a progressive increase in the diversity of the participation frameworks represented by children, as well as in the complexity of the multimodal resources they use, and a rise in children’s grammatical repertoire linked to an improvement in children’s pragmatic skills. (shrink)

Thirty years ago, Buchanan and Brock distinguished between guidance principles and interference principles in the setting of surrogate decision making on behalf of children and incompetent adult patients. They suggested that the best interest standard could serve as a guidance principle, but was insufficient as an interference principle. In this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Ross argues that the best interest standard can serve as neither a guidance nor interference principle for decision making on behalf of children, but (...) that her model of constrained parental autonomy can serve as both. I will argue that Buchanan and Brock were correct that a single model or standard cannot serve as both a guidance and interference principle in pediatrics and that the best interest standard is a sufficient guidance principle. The harm principle fulfills the conditions necessary for an interference principle, at least insofar as deciding when state intervention to interfere with parental decision making is justified. (shrink)

The “best interest standard” is the guidance principle for pediatric healthcare in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). In the UK, the best interest standard may also be used as an intervention principle when parents make good but non-ideal decisions whereas intervention in the US requires a determination of abuse or neglect. I examine whether and how the different uses of the best interest standard influence predictive genetic testing of children.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:74 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer L. Holland “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust”: Children and Young Adults in the Anti-Abortion Movement During the last three decades of the twentieth century, children across the United States regularly encountered adults who both hailed them as survivors of a holocaust and pleaded with them not to perpetrate one. These adults were not (...) talking about war, at least not in a traditional sense. They were talking about legal abortion. Children and young adults often heard this pitch in school presentations like one made in the mid-1970s by a California anti-abortion group, United Parents Under God, in which pictures of aborted fetuses (whose “feet will never kick a football... run on a playground... or play hopscotch”) and their imagined lost life stories were the centerpiece. Next to pictures of aborted fetuses were pictures of two prematurely born infants of color (the only people of color in the presentation) who were supposedly in danger under Roe v. Wade. With murder hovering in the air, activists asked their teen audience, “Is someone you love next?” According to these California anti-abortion activists, young people were physically and intellectually vulnerable to pro-choice views because they inhabited “atheistic” classrooms “where evil can no longer be called ‘evil.’” “You are quite literally ‘trapped’ in a completely ‘pagan’ situation in our secular society and schools and we must reach you anyway we can,” they continued. In the so-called “pro-life” worldview, liberals were brainwashing children and young people through the media, public schools, and many other institutions. Jennifer L. Holland 75 “Women’s liberal abortion speakers,” political scientists, “who typically work for the STATE” and for whom the “ends justify the means,” and new “secular-science textbooks”—all were trying to frighten teenagers to “into killing [their] OWN OFFSPRING,” activists said. Anti-abortion women, “ordinary women... who LOVE you” according to the California presentation, sought to protect children while feminist “witches... distort [ed] God’s purposes of sexuality.”1 In order to counteract what they viewed as corruption, anti-abortion activists had to wage a counter -battle, politicizing children in order to make them innocent again. In practice, that meant bringing the abortion wars—with their attendant graphic imagery and discussions of immorality, murder, and “holocausts ”—into the haven of childhood. From the movement’s early days, anti-abortion activists waged their fight in the name of innocent young people; abortion, they said, was a genocide of children. While these activists were certainly not the only US movement to use the supposed vulnerability of children to elicit public support for their cause, they also did something different. For the anti-abortion movement, children and young adults were more than just endangered innocents; they were also potential perpetrators. Young people, it seemed, were more liberal than their elders, having allegedly been reared in and indoctrinated by liberal culture. They seemed, in short, to be a potentially pro-choice generation. Thus, adult activists spoke more to and about young people at the end of the century. Adults needed young people to speak for fetuses as “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust,” but they also needed to convert and save America through them. The anti-abortion narrative of childhood vulnerability offered the restoration of social hierarchies as a solution to the problem of abortion. It was “women’s liberal abortion speakers” and feminist “witches” who were the sources of societal indoctrination. Pro-choice women separated sex and reproduction, thus undermining women’s role in society and changing their relationships with men. More subtly, anti-abortion 1. United Parents Under God, “That They May Live: A Presentation on Abortion,” n.d., folder 1, United Parents Under God Ephemeral Materials, Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. This publication was probably created in the early to mid-1970s because the few citations contained within are from between 1970 and 1973. 76 Jennifer L. Holland activists—who were almost always white—mourned the loss of past racial hierarchies while also envisioning theirs as a civil rights movement. In the California presentation mentioned above, activists explicitly compared abortion to mandated... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that the legal protection of children must be recognised as a priority. The moral rights of children are fundamental rights with different degrees of generality. They not only reflect the fact that children merit justice, but are also indispensable for the promotion of justice in society in general, thus allowing other rights, including those of adults, to be safeguarded appropriately. The rule of law and its role in reducing violence go (...) hand in hand with protecting children from harm. A childhood that is free of violence is an essential prerequisite of a just society. (shrink)

Emotional processing and episodic memory are closely related throughout childhood development. With respect to emotional episodic memory, available evidence shows that the consolidation of information is accompanied by an arousal that generates longer duration and persistence of the memory representations. In the case of early stages of development (i.e., first 5 years), it is less clear how these associations emerge and are modulated by individual and environmental factors. In this study, 116 4- to 5-years old Argentinean children from different (...) socio-environmental contexts (i.e., favorable or unfavorable living conditions at home), performed a task of visual emotional memory in which they observed a set of 15 images with variable emotional valences (negative, neutral, and positive). The child’s task was to appraise each image using one of the following three possible valences: (a) drawings of faces with smiles (positive valence), (b) drawings of faces with tears and round mouth with edges down (negative valence), or (c) drawings of faces with horizontal mouth (neutral valence). Five years-old children exhibited greater accuracy appraisal. Individual differences in emotional accuracy appraisal allowed us to observe different performances in free recall of negative visual images. Accuracy appraisal did not vary between children with respect to gender, living conditions at home, or language ability. Seven to ten days after the emotional appraisal children were asked to tell the experimenter all the images they remembered (variables of interest: free recall of negative, positive, or neutral images). Results showed individual (age) differences. Specifically, 5-years-old children evoked more images than 4-years-old children. These findings contribute to the understanding of emotional memory in early developmental stages and raise the need to include emotional appraisal in the assessment of episodic memory. (shrink)

The aim of these two studies was to test to what extent television advertisements reflect gender-role differentiation in two countries: Poland and Britain. British and Polish samples of television advertisements were analyzed and compared with previous studies. The results show slightly more gender-role stereotyping in Polish television advertisements, and a slight decline of stereotyping in Britain. The second study was conducted on children's advertisements following Furnham, Abramsky, and Gunter's content analytic study. In general, there were more advertisements oriented towards both (...) girls and boys, and there were more males as central figures. The differences between two countries were not major, suggesting that levels of gender-stereotyping in Poland and Britain are similar, with slightly more stereotyping present in Polish advertisements. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the relationship between adult attachment styles and generalized negativistic social beliefs. Two general dimensions of attachment styles, avoidance and anxiety, are considered to be manifestations of an individual’s image of other people and of the self, respectively. We suggest that both dimensions may be a substantial basis for formulating negative beliefs about the social world. Firstly, we believe that a high level of negativistic social beliefs can be positively predicted by the growth of avoidance and (...) anxiety. Secondly, we formulate an expected interaction effect. Although the nature of such an interaction is ambiguous, it may be argued as having a synergistic as well as antagonistic pattern. These hypotheses were tested and supported on a representative sample of adult Poles. (shrink)

This article explores tentatively how young children develop a sense of beauty and should be guided in doing so. Beauty is partly a matter of personal preference, but it implies a more profound and considered idea than what is pleasing or attractive. Beauty contributes to well-being and a flourishing life. Since ideas of beauty vary over time and are transmitted through culture and socialization, these are affected by socio-cultural factors such as gender, ethnicity, class and age. Children’s perceptions of beauty (...) often differ from those of adults. A sense of what is beautiful or otherwise is based mainly in emotional and sensory responses but also involves cognitive processes and judgements. Unconscious learning by immersion in beautiful environments helps children sense what is beautiful. They benefit from a wide range of opportunities and experiences and time to dwell on these and to re-present them kinaesthetically, visually and using language. While the arts and nature provide particularly fertile opportunities, aesthetic development can occur in most contexts. The role of adults should be more that of facilitator, providing opportunities, encouragement and example, than instructor. Implications for the education of the whole child are considered. (shrink)

This article regards a particular way through which adults take children into consideration and listen their voices. Reflections have sprung from a research context, focused on existential questions that children pose during their preschool years in early education settings. The research explored the meanings of these questions for children and adults involved in their education. The questions of meaning emerged by children’s discourses are considered through the representations of childhood that subtend parents and teachers’ educational practices. The article (...) discusses one of these representations, that of philosopher child, with regard on his various internal perspectives. Lipman, Kyle, Martens and Matthews are some of the authors taken into consideration in order to examine briefly some traditional approaches of doing philosophy with children and to understand the practices that teachers operate everyday in early childhood education and care services. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s view, philosophy (...) of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

The lay public inherits much of its information about disability and mental illness through the media, which often relies on information from popular scientific works. Autism, as it was defined during the dominance of psychogenic paradigms of mental illness, generated certain tropes surrounding it, many of which have been popularized through media representations. Often inaccurate, these tropes have persisted into contemporary times despite a paradigmatic shift from psychogenic to biological explanations and treatments for mental illness. The current article examines (...) class='Hi'>images and articles of children with autism from the 1960s and the early 2000s in major news media and scientific literature to highlight the persistence of themes of fragmentation and the imprisonment of children with autism. While these themes have persisted in psychological and media literature, narratives of people with autism and their families often present a different perspective. This results in two divergent ‘realities’ of autism being disseminated into the general public. (shrink)

Critical care as a discipline has become so expensive that some have proposed extensive limitations on the amount of money devoted to it by society. In this paper that issue is examined with respect to pediatric and neonatal intensive care. Initially, a case is presented which includes many of the ethical and economic issues. The neonatal population at present has a tolerable median cost, with a distinctly higher average cost created by many special cases such as the one described with (...) very high costs. The pediatric population is served by an intensive care system costing approximately one billion dollars. This contrasts with the adult costs which are markedly higher and yet do not meet the total preceived need. Different theories of justice would concede differing allocations to individuals and to the problem of critical care as a whole based on their view of the obligations of societal membership. The authors argue that in fact critical care might be analyzed from the view-point of economics more effectively by breaking down the cost allocations for different components for that care, and argue that labor is the major cost in its provision. They then argue that that labor component may be a necessary and affordable cost for a post industrial society. It may be that libertarians, Rawlsians, and utilitarians could accept such an allocation of resources. Further, it is argued that triage is not an appropriate approach to limiting expenses, and that other methodologies such as cost effectiveness are the only appropriate ones to invoke in pediatric critical care. Recognition of the economic realities present in a given case may be the key to clinicians' demonstrated reluctance to participate in the gatekeeper role through the use of triage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Listening to Reason”:The Role of Persuasion in Aristotle’s Account of Praise, Blame, and the VoluntaryAllen SpeightAristotle connects praise and blame closely to the voluntary, but the question of how his discussion of these terms should be construed more broadly in the context of a theory of responsibility has been much disputed. There are some well-known difficulties with the coherence of Aristotle's views in this regard: animals and children, for (...) example, are said to be voluntary agents, but are not held to be responsible;1 moreover, praise and blame seem to be important for what might be thought to be incompatible purposes—on the one hand, for behavioral improvement and correction (a usually prospective concern) and, on the other hand, for assessment of moral responsibility in terms of what an agent merits or deserves for what he or she has done (a retrospective concern).2One of Aristotle's first examples of the use of praise and blame in the Nicomachean Ethics captures some of the difficulty commentators have found in trying to understand his position. In drawing an analogy to illustrate the difference between parts of the soul, Aristotle comments that "in morally strong and morally weak men we praise (epainoumen) the reason that guides them and the rational element of the soul, because it exhorts them to follow the right path and to do what is best" (NE 1102b13-15). There is, he thus claims, an appetitive part of the soul thatpartakes of reason insofar as it complies with reason and accepts its leadership (hē(i) katēkoon estin autou kai peitharchikon); it possesses reason in the sense that we say it is "reasonable" to accept the advice of a father and of friends, not in the sense that we have a "rational" understanding of mathematical propositions. That the irrational element can be persuaded (peithetai) by the rational is shown by the fact that admonition (nouthetēsis) and all manner of rebuke (epitimēsis) and exhortation (paraklēsis) are possible. If it is correct to say that the appetitive part, too, has reason, it follows that the rational element of the soul has two subdivisions: the one possesses reason in the [End Page 213] strict sense, contained within itself, and the other possesses reason in the sense that it listens to reason as one would listen to a father.(NE 1102b31-1103a)I will argue that this image of listening and persuasion is more significant for Aristotle's conceptions of voluntariness and responsibility than is often thought. The image suggests not only that Aristotle is interested in both prospective moral education and retrospective assessments of responsibility, but that a crucial (and, in the literature to this point, quite neglected) term that he offers as a gloss for understanding his conception of the voluntary—the notion of peithō or persuasion—is in fact central to his employment of the categories of praise and blame in both prospective and retrospective senses. Aristotle's use of the concept of persuasion is not merely a casual gloss, but gives him instead an unusually helpful category for understanding the range of types of action within his philosophy of agency and how they fit within the larger scheme of parts of the soul in the Ethics and the distinctions among actions that stem from virtue, vice, moral weakness, and moral strength.In what follows, I will first examine how Aristotle uses peithō to explain the related notions of the voluntary (as to hekousion is usually translated) and the noncompulsory in the Nicomachean Ethics, III.5, and the Eudemian Ethics, II.8. I will then explore how Aristotle appeals to peithō and its cognates to address one of the most vexing problems his theory of voluntary agency must work out—the problem of akrasia and enkrateia (moral weakness and moral strength)—and, next, more widely how these related concepts become relevant for his account of the parts of the soul and gradations of action.I. Persuasion and the Voluntary (EE II.8 and NE III.5)Aristotle appears to link closely the notions of voluntariness (to hekousion)and persuasion (hē peithō).Bonitz's Index takes the two terms straightforwardly... (shrink)

During the COVID-19 pandemic people were increasingly obliged to wear facial masks and to reduce the number of people they met in person. In this study, we asked how these changes in social interactions are associated with young children's emotional development, specifically their emotion recognition via the labeling of emotions. Preschoolers labeled emotional facial expressions of adults and children in fully visible faces. In addition, we assessed children's COVID-19-related experiences and recorded children's gaze behavior during emotion labeling. We compared (...) different samples of preschoolers : The data for the no-COVID-19-experience sample were taken from studies conducted before the pandemic. The data for the with-COVID-19-experience sample were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland between June and November 2021. The results did not indicate differences in children's labeling behavior between the two samples except for fearful adult faces. Children with COVID-19-experience more often labeled fearful faces correctly compared to children with no COVID-19 experience. Furthermore, we found no relations between children's labeling behavior, their individual COVID-19-related experiences, and their gaze behavior. These results suggest that, even though the children had experienced differences in the amount and variability of facial input due to the pandemic, they still received enough input from visible faces to be able to recognize and label different emotions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader ResponseCathleen M. BauschatzThe Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response, by Ellen J. Esrock; xii & 241 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $36.50.Ellen Esrock’s The Reader’s Eye is a call for greater attention to the process of visual imaging in the study of readers and reading. Much of the book summarizes earlier research, showing the bias against readerly imaging (...) on the part of scholars who have viewed the reading process as solely cognitive and linguistic, rather than affective and visual.Part One summarizes some of these earlier views, finding phenomenological approaches the most friendly to visualization, while linguistic (semiotic) and psychoanalytic studies downplay its importance. Freudian approaches to reading, for example, view images as “hallucinations,” and value displacement from image to word. Lacan likewise minimizes the importance of imagery, despite the fact that concepts like the “mirror stage” could obviously benefit from visualization.The second part of the book summarizes recent advances in cognitive psychology, leading to the development of experimental tools for measuring readerly imaging. While late nineteenth-century psychology expressed interest in image-formation, behaviorism put a stop to this work. In the 1960s, interest in imagery returned, and with it the study of “mental maps,” verbal learning, and the role of the visual in memory. Esrock details the use of images in teaching children to read, but shows that this process has not been taken seriously in research on adults. The most promising direction in contemporary research, she finds, is the discovery that visualization and affective experience are interwoven. Considerations about the pleasure of reading, right/left brain function, and the role of the visual in psychosexual stages (readerly voyeurism, for example) are detailed here.The last chapter contains an interesting opposition between the objections of critic William Gass to readerly imaging and the use of visual images by writer Italo Calvino (Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities). Esrock shows that it is almost impossible to interpret Calvino’s work without forming visual images.The conclusion finally presents the author’s case for the importance of visualization to both the cognitive and affective sides of the reading process. She admits the presence of differences among genres, authors, and readers, but still finds a set of general principles which should apply to all. Among these are the claims that imaging affects memory, that it clarifies spatial descriptions, and thus makes a fictional world concrete. Esrock calls for more attention to imaging by reader-response critics, classroom pedagogy, linguistics, and gender/cultural studies.The Reader’s Eye provides a solid history and summary of the current positions of a variety of fields on the hitherto neglected topic of readerly imaging. One criticism of the book might be that the author waits until the conclusion to [End Page 363] present her own findings, which occupy only twenty-seven of the volume’s 205 pages. Enthusiasts of this topic will hope that Professor Esrock may expand on some of these ideas in her next book.Cathleen M. BauschatzUniversity of MaineCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The cultural-historical approach provides the deep theoretical grounds for the analysis of children’s play. Vygotsky suggested three critical features of play: switching to an imaginary situation, taking on a play role, and acting according to a set of rules defined by the role. Collaboration, finding ideas and materials for creating an imaginary situation, defining play roles, and planning the plot are complex tasks for children. However, the question is, do children need educator’s support during the play to develop their (...) executive functions, and to what extent? This experimental study was aimed at answering this inquiry. The four modes of sociodramatic play were created which differed in the adult intervention, from non-involvement in the play to its entire organization. The play could be child-led, adult-led, or free ; and there was also a control group where the children heard the same stimulus stories as the other groups but then followed them up with a drawing activity instead of a play activity. The study revealed that, firstly, the ways of educator’s involvement in the play differed in their potential in respect to the development of executive functions, and, secondly, this influence was not equal for different components of executive functions. Free play in the experiment was not a beneficial condition for the development of any of the studied components of executive functions, compared to the conditions involving the participation of an adult in the play. Furthermore, the type of adult intervention stimulated the development of various executive functions. The entire organization of the play by the adult had a positive impact of their general development. In contrast, the adult’s assistance in the organization of the children’s play had a positive effect on the development of inhibitory control. The study results can be helpful when considering educational practices within a cultural-historical approach to engaging the potential of play in children’s learning and development around the world. (shrink)

Women generally report greater religiosity and justify morally debatable behaviors less than men. This study examined if personal religiosity mediates the relationship of gender and justification of different types of morally debatable behaviors across societies with diverse religious heritages. We also explored how a society’s endorsement of preferred qualities in the socialization of children would moderate the links between personal religiosity and justification of morally debatable types of behavior. Using the World Values Survey Wave 7 data (47 societies; 66,992 (...) respondents), we identified three types of justifiable behaviors, namely, behaviors threatening human life and family values, dishonest-illegal, and interpersonally violent behaviors. Controlling for age and education, women scored higher in personal religiosity and justified dishonest-illegal and interpersonally violent behaviors less than men, but behaviors threatening human life and family values more than men. Personal religiosity only partially mediated the link between gender and the justification of behaviors threatening human life and family values, indicating that factors other than personal religiosity account for gender differences in justifying types of morally defensible behavior. The linkage strengths of personal religiosity to behaviors threatening human life and family values and dishonest-illegal behaviors were moderated by societal endorsement of preferred qualities in the socialization of children. Thus, both gender and the socialization of a society’s human capital impact on how different types of morally debatable behaviors are justified around the world. Possible explanations for these results are offered and future research directions suggested. (shrink)

This paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides' Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation of women was intimately connected with the social and political life of the polis. In a discussion of iconography, the (...) theater industry and audience I argue that female characters became one of the means by which different groups promoted partisan interests based on class and social status. In Part III, I show how the Maiden solicits the competing interests of the theater audience. After discussing the centrality and marginality of the Maiden's character, I draw upon the funeral oration as a comparative model with which to understand the quite different role of self-sacrifice in tragedy. In addition to representing and mystifying the interests of elite, lower class and marginal groups, the play glorifies a subordinate character whose contradictory social status embodies the social position of other “marginal” members of Athenian society. The play stages a model for taking political action to transform the social system and for commemorating the tragic costs of such undertakings. (shrink)

Education as a deliberate activity and purposive process necessarily involves mediation, in the sense that the educator mediates between the child and the world. This can take different forms: the educator may function as a guide who initiates children into particular practices and domains and their modes of thinking and perceiving; or act as a filter, selecting what of the world the child encounters and how; or meet the child as representative of the adult world. I look at these (...) types of mediation at the hand of the work of John Dewey, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Richard Peters. The purpose of this paper is to explore the bearing that the mediating role of the educator—as interpreted by these authors—has on the role wonder may play in the educational process. I suggest that initiation highlights the familiarizing function of wonder, and is most readily associated with inquisitive wonder; representation draws attention to the defamiliarizing role of wonder, as well as to its world-affirming role; and selection foregrounds the distinction between momentary and dispositional wonder. (shrink)

The role of digital technology in shaping attention and cognitive development has been at the centre of public discourse for decades. The current review presents findings from three main bodies of literature on the implications of technology use for attention and cognitive control: television, video games, and digital multitasking. The aim is to identify key lessons from prior research that are relevant for the current generation of digital users. In particular, the lack of scientific consensus on whether digital technologies are (...) good or bad for children reflects that effects depend on users’ characteristics, the form digital technologies take, the circumstances in which use occurs and the interaction between the three factors. Some features of digital media may be particularly problematic, but only for certain users and only in certain contexts. Similarly, individual differences mediate how, when and why individuals use technology, as well as how much benefit or harm can be derived from its use. The finding emerging from the review on the large degree of heterogeneity in associations is especially relevant due to the rapid development and diffusion of a large number of different digital technologies and contents, and the increasing variety of user experiences. We discuss the importance of leveraging existing knowledge and integrating past research findings into a broader organizing framework in order to guide emerging technology-based research and practice. We end with a discussion of some of the challenges and unaddressed issues in the literature and propose directions for future research. (shrink)

This paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides' Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation of women was intimately connected with the social and political life of the polis. In a discussion of iconography, the (...) theater industry and audience I argue that female characters became one of the means by which different groups promoted partisan interests based on class and social status. In Part III, I show how the Maiden solicits the competing interests of the theater audience. After discussing the centrality (as a heroine from an aristocratic family) and marginality (as a woman and associated with other marginal social groups) of the Maiden's character, I draw upon the funeral oration as a comparative model with which to understand the quite different role of self-sacrifice in tragedy. In addition to representing and mystifying the interests of elite, lower class and marginal groups, the play glorifies a subordinate character whose contradictory social status (both subordinate and elite) embodies the social position of other “marginal” members of Athenian society. The play stages a model for taking political action to transform the social system and for commemorating the tragic costs of such undertakings. (shrink)

Previously conducted structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies on the neuroanatomical correlates of mathematical abilities and competencies have a number of methodological limitations. Besides small sample sizes, the majority of these studies have employed voxel-based morphometry (VBM) – a method that, although it is easily to implement, has some major drawbacks. Taking this into account, the current study is the first to investigate in a large sample of typically developed adults the associations between mathematical abilities and variations in brain (...) surface structure by using surface-based morphometry (SBM). SBM is a method that also allows the investigation of brain morphometry by avoiding the pitfalls of VBM. Eighty-nine young adults were tested with a large battery of psychometric tests to measure mathematical competencies in four different areas: (1) simple arithmetic, (2) complex arithmetic, (3) higher-order mathematics and (4) numerical intelligence. In addition, we asked participants for their mathematics grade of their final school exam. Inside the MRI scanner, we collected high-resolution T1-weighted anatomical images from each subject. SBM analyses were performed with the computational anatomy toolbox (CAT12) and indices for cortical thickness, for cortical surface complexity, for gyrification and for sulcal depth were calculated. Further analyses revealed associations between (1) the cortical surface complexity of the right superior temporal gyrus and numerical intelligence, (2) the depth of the right central sulcus and adults’ ability to solve complex arithmetic problems and (3) the depth of the left parieto-occipital sulcus and adults’ higher-order mathematics competence. Interestingly, no relationships with previously reported brain regions were observed, thus, suggesting the importance of similar research to confirm the role of the brain regions found in this study. (shrink)

Most studies examining children's understanding of transitive sentences focus on the morphosyntactic properties of the construction and ignore prosody. But adults use prosody in many different ways to interpret ambiguous sentences. In two studies we investigated whether 5-year-old German children use prosody to determine participant roles in object-first (OVS) sentences with novel verbs (i.e., whether they use prosodic marking to overrule word order as a cue). Results showed that children identify participant roles better in this atypically (...) ordered construction when sentences are realized with the marked, OVS-typical intonational pattern, especially in combination with case marking (Study 1). In a second study, we embedded these sentences into an appropriate discourse context. The results show that, even in the absence of any case marking, children understand participant roles when they are realized with the appropriate intonational pattern. These findings demonstrate that young children can use intonation to help identify participant roles in transitive sentences, at least in marked constructions such as the German object-first (OVS) construction. (shrink)

Research has documented that individuals consider outcomes, intentions, and transgressor negligence when making morally relevant judgments (Nobes, Panagiotaki, & Engelhardt, 2017). However, less is known about whether individuals attend to both victim and transgressor negligence in their evaluations. The current study measured 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds (N = 70), 7‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 54), and adults' (N = 97, ages 18–25 years) moral judgments about scenarios in which an accidental transgression occurred involving property damage or physical harm. Participants were (...) either assigned to conditions where the victim or the transgressor was negligent. Results revealed attention to negligence among all participants across a range of different moral judgment measures (including acceptability judgments, punishment judgments, and attributions of blame), with age‐related increases in attention to negligence evident. Results provide novel evidence that children and adults consider not just outcomes and intentions, but also the role of negligence in both victims and transgressors, when making social decisions. (shrink)

Adults increase the certainty of their inductive inferences by observing more diverse instances. However, most young children fail to do so. The present study tested the hypothesis that children's sensitivity to instance diversity is determined by three variables: ability to discriminate among instances ( Discrimination ); an intuition that large numbers of instances increase the strength of conclusion ( Monotonicity ); ability to detect subcategories and evaluate numerical differences between the subcategories, or Extraction . A total of 219 Chinese (...) children aged 6 to 11 were tested for sensitivity to diversity by means of Discrimination, Monotonicity, and Extraction. The results indicated that children at all ages were able to discriminate instances and attend to set size. However, only 9- and 11-year-olds demonstrated Extraction and sensitivity to diversity. Furthermore, among all children diversity scores increased linearly with the level of Extraction. These results suggest that the law of large numbers plays a role in children's diversity-based reasoning. (shrink)

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork the article analyses the experiences of 8-10 year old children in three different institutions. It is shown how the children create and maintain different social landscapes in each setting. This means that children's experiences are related to the position they have in the landscape. The notion social identity is used to discuss and explain these findings. With this notion identity is explained as an interplay between internal and external factors: between group-identification and categorisation. (...) Children's different identities in different settings are not created by children themselves, but must bee seen in relation to the categorisation used by the adults to classify children. The professional categorisations of children are a central part of the social space in relation to which children act, talk, and play. (shrink)

From an early age, exposure to a spoken language has allowed us to implicitly capture the structure underlying the succession of speech sounds in that language and to segment it into meaningful units. Statistical learning, the ability to pick up patterns in the sensory environment without intention or reinforcement, is thus assumed to play a central role in the acquisition of the rule-governed aspects of language, including the discovery of word boundaries in the continuous acoustic stream. Although extensive evidence has (...) been gathered from artificial languages experiments showing that children and adults are able to track the regularities embedded in the auditory input, as the probability of one syllable to follow another syllable in the speech stream, the developmental trajectory of this ability remains controversial. In this work, we have collected Event-Related Potentials while 5-year-old children and young adults were exposed to a speech stream made of the repetition of eight three-syllable nonsense words presenting different levels of predictability to mimic closely what occurs in natural languages and to get new insights into the changes that the mechanisms underlying auditory statistical learning might undergo through the development. The participants performed the aSL task first under implicit and, subsequently, under explicit conditions to further analyze if children take advantage of previous knowledge of the to-be-learned regularities to enhance SL, as observed with the adult participants. These findings would also contribute to extend our knowledge of the mechanisms available to assist SL at each developmental stage. Although behavioral signs of learning, even under explicit conditions, were only observed for the adult participants, ERP data showed evidence of online segmentation in the brain in both groups, as indexed by modulations in the N100 and N400 components. A detailed analysis of the neural data suggests, however, that adults and children rely on different mechanisms to assist the extraction of word-like units from the continuous speech stream, hence supporting the view that SL with auditory linguistic materials changes through development. (shrink)

Children’s literature provides a critical method of socialization and familiarization with gender roles, providing examples, boundaries, and limitations for gender identity construction. While extensive research has been done on how children’s literature depicts both traditional and non-traditional gender roles, very little research has been published on the cultural differences between literary representations. The aim of the present paper is to describe the representations of social roles of men and women in American, Czech, and Spanish children’s books published (...) between 2010 and 2020. Three best-selling children’s picture books from each year from each respective culture were selected and analyzed, culminating in a thematic analysis of ninety-nine books. Using inductive thematic analysis, the study found all three cultures to be conservative in their depictions of gender roles, with Czech books as the most likely to feature traditional gender roles. Spanish books are more, and American books are the most subversive in their depiction of gender roles, containing an increasing number of non-traditional elements over an examined time period. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a forward-looking account of the difference between the responsibility of children and the responsibility of adults. I do so by means of criticizing agency-cultivation accounts of responsibility. According to these accounts, the justification for holding a person to a norm is the cultivation of their moral agency, and children are, just like adults, considered responsible to the extent that they can have their moral agency cultivated in this manner. Like many forward-looking accounts, these (...) accounts claim that the purpose of holding adults to norms is similar to the purpose of holding children to norms. I argue that the justifications for holding adults to norms are different because of the particular ways in which adults can be in moral disagreement with one another, and the consequences that this has. Moral disagreement is relevant to consequentialist accounts because it impacts on whether and how we can secure beneficial outcomes via holding someone to a norm. One of the upshots of this analysis is that the forward-looking justification for holding adults to norms is qualitatively different from how and why we should hold children to norms. (shrink)