Cognitive Development and Acquisition of Language.

In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank C. Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages. Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal (...) kinds studies, natural-kinds studies, and studies of fundamental categorical distinctions. He shows that all this evidence, when put together, leads to a better understanding of semantic and conceptual development. The book opens with an analysis of the problems of modeling qualitative changes in conceptual development, investigating how concepts of natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts evolve. The studies on nominal kinds document a powerful and unambiguous developmental pattern indicating a shift from a reliance on global tabulations of characteristic features to what appears to be a small set of defining ones. The studies on natural kinds document an analogous shift toward a core theory instead of simple definition. Both sets of studies are strongly supported by cross cultural data. While these patterns seem to suggest that the young child organizes concepts according to characteristic features, Keil argues that there is a framework of conceptual categories and causal beliefs that enables even very young children to understand kinds at a deeper, theoretically guided, level. This account suggests a new way of understanding qualitative change and carries strong implications for how concepts are represented at any point in development. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

On standard readings of Grice, Gricean communication requires (a) possession of a concept of belief, (b) the ability to make complex inferences about others’ goal-directed behaviour, and (c) the ability to entertain fourth order meta-representations. To the extent that these abilities are pre-requisites of Gricean communication they are inconsistent with the view that Gricean communication could play a role in their development. In this paper, I argue that a class of ‘minimally Gricean acts’ satisfy the intentional structure described by (...) Grice, but require none of abilities (a)-(c). As a result, Gricean communicative abilities may indeed contribute to the development of (a)-(c) – in particular, by enabling language development. This conclusion has important implications for our theorising about cognitive development. (shrink)

_Cognitive Developments in Economics_ proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human problem solving, choice, decision-making and change, to explain economic transactions, and the nature and evolution of organisations and institutions. The book contributes to a large spectrum of economic fields such as consumer theory, economics of the firm, economics of innovation, evolutionary economics and experimental economics.

_Cognitive Developments in Economics_ proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human problem solving, choice, decision-making and change, to explain economic transactions, and the nature and evolution of organisations and institutions. The book contributes to a large spectrum of economic fields such as consumer theory, economics of the firm, economics of innovation, evolutionary economics and experimental economics.

How do minds emerge from developing brains? According to the representational features of cortex are built from the dynamic interaction between neural growth mechanisms and environmentally derived neural activity. Contrary to popular selectionist models that emphasize regressive mechanisms, the neurobiological evidence suggests that this growth is a progressive increase in the representational properties of cortex. The interaction between the environment and neural growth results in a flexible type of learning: minimizes the need for prespecification in accordance with recent neurobiological evidence (...) that the developing cerebral cortex is largely free of domain-specific structure. Instead, the representational properties of cortex are built by the nature of the problem domain confronting it. This uniquely powerful and general learning strategy undermines the central assumption of classical learnability theory, that the learning properties of a system can be deduced from a fixed computational architecture. Neural constructivism suggests that the evolutionary emergence of neocortex in mammals is a progression toward more flexible representational structures, in contrast to the popular view of cortical evolution as an increase in innate, specialized circuits. Human cortical postnatal development is also more extensive and protracted than generally supposed, suggesting that cortex has evolved so as to maximize the capacity of environmental structure to shape its structure and function through constructive learning. (shrink)

Why do children learn language more easily than adults do? This puzzle has fascinated cognitive and language scientists for decades. In the present letter, we approach the language learning puzzle from a cognitive perspective that is inspired by evidence from the perceptual and motor learning literature. Neuroscientific studies show that two memory systems in the brain are involved in human learning: an early implicit procedural memory system and a late-developing cognitive or declarative memory system. We argue that higher cognitive (...) class='Hi'>development constrains implicit statistical learning processes that are essential for learning patterns and regularities in languages, that is, the adult cognitive architecture has a cost. This is supported by experimental evidence showing that acquisition of implicit linguistic knowledge is enhanced under cognitive depletion in adults. More research is needed to test the cognitive cost hypothesis as it could partly solve the language learning puzzle. (shrink)

Psychologists have long debated the underlying cause of infants' perseverative reaching. Thelen et al. explain the error in terms of general processes that make goal-directed actions to remembered locations. The context- and experience-dependent nature of their model implies that there is no single cause of the A-not-B error, and, more generally, no core essence to cognitive development.

This Element describes the main theories that guide contemporary research in cognitive development along with research discoveries in several important cognitive abilities: attention, language, social cognition, memory, metacognition and executive function, and problem solving and reasoning. Biological and social contributions are considered side-by-side, and cultural contributions are highlighted. As children participate in social interactions and learn to use cultural symbols and tools to organize and support their thinking, the behaviors and understandings of the social community and the culture more (...) broadly become an integral part of children's thoughts and actions. Culture, the natural ecological setting or habitat of human beings, plays a significant role by providing support and direction for cognitive development. Without the capacity to learn socially, human cognition would be markedly different from what it is today. (shrink)

There is clearly some area of thematic overlap between the subject matter of Edmund Husserl's genetic phenomenology and studies of cognitive development. I aim in this paper to clarify the extent of this overlap. This will, I hope, serve as an indicator about whether genetic phenomenology might be able to shed some light on actual cognitive-development phenomena. To begin with, I differentiate two strands within Husserl's genetic phenomenology, an idealized and a concrete approach. After providing a schematic outline (...) of the former I argue that its application to actual, empirical cases of cognitive development faces serious challenges. I then set out the concrete approach, in two stages. First, I explain the importance of bodily experience on the concrete approach and note some affinities it has with the work of Piaget and embodied approaches to cognitive development. Second, I introduce the notion of affect as the engine of the developmental process on the concrete approach, an idea that, moreover, helps clarify how the concrete approach overcomes the problems facing the idealized approach. Finally, I propose that Vygotsky's notion of the 'zone of proximal development' can serve as a bridge between Husserl's concrete approach and contemporary scaffolded and extended accounts of cognitive development. (shrink)

This paper discusses how to use cognitive developmental psychology to create a business ethics course that has philosophical integrity. It begins with the pedagogical problem to be overcome when students are not philosophy majors. To provide a context for the practical recommendations, Kohlberg's cognitive developmental theory is summarized and then the relationship between Kohlberg's theory, normative philosophy, and teaching is analyzed. The conclusion recommends strategies that should help overcome some of the vexing pedagogical problems mentioned in the first section. In (...) particular, the approach is designed to teach an appreciation for the practical necessity of philosophy in a pluralistic society. (shrink)

In this study, we investigated the relationship between mothers' psychological lexicon and children's cognitive and socio-emotive development as assessed through conceptual and semantic understanding tasks, in addition to the traditional tasks of theory of mind. Currently, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the frequency of mothers' mental state words used in mother-child picture-book reading is linked with children's theory of mind skills. Furthermore, mothers' use of cognitive terms is more strongly related to children's theory of mind performances than (...) the mothers' references to other mental states, such as desires or emotions (Rollo and Buttiglieri, 2009 ). Current literature has established that early maternal input is related to later child mental state understanding; however it has not yet clarified which maternal terms are most useful for the socio-emotional and cognitive development of the child, and which aspect of the cognitive development benefits from the mother-child interaction. The present study addresses this issue and focuses on the relationship between mothers' mental state talk and children's behavior in conceptual and semantic tasks, and in a theory of mind task. In this study fifty pairs consisting of mothers and their 3 to 6-year-old children participated in two sessions: (1) The mothers read a picture book to their children. To assess the maternal psychological lexicon, their narrative was codified according to the categories of mental state references used in literature: perceptual, emotional, volitional, cognitive, moral, and communicative. (2) After a few days, the conceptual and semantic skills of the children (tasks of contextualization and classification, memory, and definition of words) and their psychological lexicon were assessed. The results suggest close links between the frequency and variety of mothers' mental state words and some semantic and conceptual skills of children. (shrink)

In Section 1, I introduce three views that explain human cognitive development from different standpoints: Marcus’s neo-nativism, standard neuroconstructivism, and neo-neuroconstructivism. In Section 2, I assess Marcus’s attempt to reconcile nativism with developmental flexibility. In Section 3, I argue that in structurally reconfiguring nativism, Marcus ends up transforming it into an unrecognizable form, and I claim that his view could be accommodated within the more general framework provided by standard neuroconstructivism. In Section 4, I focus on recent empirical findings (...) in neuropsychology and cultural/social neuroscience, and propose a friendly revision to standard neuroconstructivism, thus developing the neo-neuroconstructivist view. I conclude the article in Section 5 by analysing the implications of the results discussed in Section 4 for both neo-nativism and standard neuroconstructivism. 1 Introduction2 Marcus’s Neo-nativism3 Is Marcus’s Neo-nativism Really a Form of Nativism?4 Neo-neuroconstructivism and Dynamic Enskillment5 Conclusion. (shrink)

Attempting to balance the needs and interests of minors with the obligation to protect them from their own potentially harmful decisions poses an ethical challenge for the physician. This problem is further exacerbated when the context is not medical treatment but organ donation. That is, medical treatment scenarios generally involve decisions likely to result in objective improvements to the minor's health status. Consent to organ donation, however, raises several vexing problems. First, how should the provider measure both the cognitive ability (...) and competence to consent of the minor to ensure that the minor comprehends the risks and benefits of donation and that no coercion is involved? Second, given that improvement of one's health is an unlikely scenario, is there a way to measure subjective determinations of satisfaction and altruism enjoyed by a minor following organ donation? If so, should the physician regard these values in a manner analogous to physical improvement? Finally, are parents the appropriate decisionmakers for their children when a sibling-to-sibling donation occurs? Is it possible for parents to always act in the best interests of both children in this event? (shrink)

Siyaves Azeri (2020) quite well shows that arithmetical thinking emerges on the basis of specific social practices and material engagement (clay tokens for economic exchange practices beget number concepts, e.g.). But his discussion here is relegated mostly to Neolithic and Bronze Age practices. While surely such practices produced revolutions in the cognitive abilities of many humans, much of the cognitive architecture that allows normative conceptual thought was already in place long before this time. This response, then, is an attempt to (...) sketch the deep prehistory of human cognition in order to show the inter-social bases of normative thought in general. To do this, I will look first to the work of Vygotsky and Leontiev, two often neglected psychologists whose combined efforts culminate in a developmental account of human cognitive origins. Then, I will review some key insights from the contemporary comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello—whose project is admittedly a Vygotskian one—in order to further shed light on the social-practical basis of abstract thought, of which mathematical cognition is surely a part. (shrink)

Thelen et al.'s account of cognition as the dynamic interaction of processes of perceiving, reaching, and remembering within a movement planning field is a useful articulation of the Piagetian concept of sensorimotor cognition. The claim that the same kind of analysis applies to all kinds of cognition at all ages, however, is questioned in light of the distinction between sensorimotor and symbolic cognition.

The premise of this article is that cognitive development involves both conceptual and semiotic achievements. From this perspective, the authors emphasize the distinctness of the semiotic issues and develop a differentiated appreciation of the semiotic aspects of cognition, particularly in the field of elementary mathematical cognition. The authors provide semiotic analyses of the differences between counting, adding, and multiplying and of the conventional place-value system. The authors introduce the concept of the field of reference of a sign, the differentiation (...) of the field into foreground and background, and the dynamics within the field of reference. Finally, the authors relate these ideas to the dynamics between two dimensions of semiotic relations: the sign-referent dimension and the sign-sign dimension. (shrink)

Millikan's theory of substance concepts has advantages for psychological theories, including those in cognitive development. However, the disadvantage is that it cannot be generalized even to some of the most common concepts that children acquire in the early years of life. For a general theory we must get beyond substances.

Thelen et al. not only offer an important new theoretical account of the Stage 4 object permanence error but provide the foundation of a new theory of cognitive development that is grounded in action. The success of dynamic field theory as a more general account of cognitive functioning, however, will depend on the degree to which it can model more generative capacities that are not limited to simple choice situations. Imitation and problem solving are suggested as two capacities that (...) might be productively modeled within their approach. (shrink)

Purpose: My first purpose is to present an epistemological and ideological analysis of various conceptions of the mind--culture relationship and to state why it is fruitless to set them against each other. My second purpose is to answer the following two questions within the framework of cultural cognitive development: (1) How do I understand and explain the interaction between two cultural actors, one of whom is myself? (2) How do I model cultural intersubjectivity? Addressing these two aims, I want (...) to make the nature of observer participation explicit to myself, then to the reader. Design: I describe the personal schemes I use in my cross-cultural research. After defining and comparing different conceptual and methodological instruments, I go on to argue in favor of an experimental methodological approach based on a naturalistic constructivist epistemological framework. Findings: Among the potential ontological and epistemological conceptions related to the human mind, I consciously argue for a naturalistic ontology and a constructivist epistemology. In line with this philosophical view, the knowledge on the cognitive development of children pertaining to different cultures appears as my personal scheme's production. Such production is a permanent object of debate in the scientific community and in the wider community of studied subjects. Original value -- The ideas and concepts developed in the present paper are neither new nor innovative. I relate the conceptual shift from a positivist to a radical constructivist epistemology that was necessary in order for me to be able to study the relationship between culture and children's cognitive development. Implications: While the present discussion may not be innovative from a radical constructivist point of view, it is so from the point of view of mainstream developmental psychology. (shrink)