1. Baby Geniuses & The Myth of Infant IQ

    Three-year-old William Potter, with a purported IQ of 140, has just been accepted by Mensa. If you think that seems a little early, the youngest member of Mensa is actually Elise Tan Roberts (IQ - 156), who was inducted at just 28 months of age.

    Potter (left) and Roberts (right), two itty-bitty members of Mensa.

    I don’t doubt that there is something exceptional about these children, but a few words of caution before you take your toddler to have their IQ assessed by the nearest child psychologist:

    The Bayleys Scales, typically used to measure development from ages 1-42 months, is different from scales used to measure intelligence in later childhood and adulthood. Scores on the Bayleys only provide very general information about developmental level and have no correlation with later IQ. That is, no matter what your baby’s score on the Bayleys, such a score cannot be used to predict later IQ at all. Be cautious of programs that claim to boost “IQ” in infants and toddlers, since there is currently no way to systematically measure it! Lastly, don’t fret (or celebrate) if your baby seems to be slightly behind (or ahead) of other babies in their age range - individual variation is normal and usually insignificant.

  2. carolynbigs:

    “In this reprise of a now-classic Stanford psychological experiment from the 1960s, kids are put in a room with a marshmallow and told they can either eat it immediately or wait until the researcher gets back, and they’ll be given a second marshmallow. Hilarity ensues as the kids suffer marshmallow temptation!

    But the consequences go deeper: In the New Yorker article “Don’t!” from May that detailed the very same experiment, it turned out that the ones who passed the marshmallow test enjoyed greater success as adults. Said Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control… It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”

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  4. Monkey See, Monkey Don’t

    Mirror neurons and differences in imitation patterns of humans and other primates.

    Mirror neurons, studied extensively in Rhesus monkeys using single-cell recording techniques, have been used to explain a number of phenomena in humans: imitation, empathy, theory of mind, and language acquisition (to name just a few.) However, the mirror system in humans has only been indirectly studied using imaging techniques, leaving much room for speculation as to what exactly the human mirror system does and if it is at all similar to the mirror neurons found in our distant relatives, Macaca mulatta.


    Rhesus monkey.

    So what does a mirror neuron do, anyway? The mirror neurons studied in Rhesus monkeys do two things: they fire when the monkey reaches for an object, and they fire when the monkey watches someone else, such as a human experimenter, reach for an object. For this reason, it has been claimed that mirror neurons form the basis of imitation, allowing the individual to map someone else’s actions onto their own actions. If I see you stick out your tongue, I can stick out my tongue too. I can imitate you, all thanks to my mirror neurons.


    Newborn human infants are capable of imitation.

    There’s just one problem: chimps, our closest primate relatives, don’t imitate, at least not the way humans do. Human infants and children will imitate all kinds of actions by adults. For example, newborn human infants will stick out their tongue in response to someone else sticking out theirs. While watching an adult perform a series of actions, some relevant and some irrelevant, in order to solve a puzzle, human children will repeat all of the actions in the sequence, even if they are irrelevant to the task. Chimps, on the other hand, will imitate only those actions that are relevant to solving the problem, ignoring the irrelevant actions.


    Chimps only imitate actions that are important to solving a task, such as retrieving the contents of the puzzle box pictured above. Human children, on the other hand, will imitate every action, including those that are irrelevant to the task.

    Some researchers have suggested that in chimps, the mirror system is not for imitating low-level kinematic features of action, as a baby does when they stick out their tongue after watching someone else do the same. Rather, the mirror system in chimps might serve the purpose of extracting the goal structure of the observed action - that is, for understanding that an agent is performing a goal-directed action for a purpose, such as when someone reaches for an object. The mirror system might aid the chimp in representing the intentional actions of agents, as it is active when perceiving a goal-directed movement, including one’s own, which is indeed what happens when the rhesus monkey itself reaches for an object.


    This leaves open two possibilities: the mirror system in humans might be qualitatively different than the mirror system in other primates, representing only low-level kinematic features rather than the goal structure of an event, or the human mirror system is more refined than that of other primates, allowing humans to encode intentions more flexibly, resulting in the different patterns of imitation found in humans and other primates.

    Ref: Lyons, D. E., Santos, L.R. & Keil, F.C. (2006). Reflections of other minds: how primate social cognition can inform the function of mirror neurons. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 16(2), 230-239. View

  5. Theories of Language Acquisition

    Outside-In (Empiricist) Theories
    - Propose no innate linguistic knowledge.
    - More general, nonlinguistic, cognitive categories (such as agent, patient, and location) form the building blocks for language acquisition.
    - Children have domain-general learning systems (not exclusive to language) that allow them to organize linguistic data.

    Problems:
    - These “empiricist” theories already presuppose much possibly innate, nonlinguistic knowledge.
    - If there is a direct mapping between cognitive categories (assumed to be universal) and language, then why aren’t all languages the same?
    - How are cognitive categories translated into syntactic categories?
    - Does not solve “the logical problem of language acquisition.”

    Inside-Out (Nativist) Theories
    - Children are granted innate, domain-specific, linguistic knowledge.
    - Emphasize grammar “discovery” rather than grammar “construction.”
    - Structure-oriented nativist theorists emphasize the principles and parameters that need to be innately granted in order for language to be learnable. (tend to be linguists)
    - Process-oriented nativist theorists focus on the mapping between function and form and emphasize the means by which children discover grammar. Concerned with how the child breaks into language. (tend to be psychologists)

    Problems:
    - Criticized for being nondevelopmental.
    - Reduces the importance of environmental input.
    - Often relies on “maturation” (brain magic) when structures, proposed to be innate, have not yet appeared.

    [Notes from “The Origins of Grammar” by Hirsch-Pasek & Golinkoff]

  6. Early Bilingualism Adds to Cognitive Abilities

    fylang:

    Seems like a no-brainer, but in this study, infants (24 months) were studied, and bilingual ones were able perform better in cognitive activities where they were distracted than their unilingual peers, meaning the benefits of early bilingualism appear sooner than originally thought.

  7. »  Origins of Mind 101 : The Thoughtful Animal

    ” If I had to describe the mission, the point, the raison d’etre of the entire field of psychology in just one sentence, I would say: Psychology aims to determine the relative extents to which biology and experience determine cognition and behavior.” And, as you might expect, there are widely differing schools of thought. Nativists emphasize genetics, biology, and innate mechanisms. By contrast, the empiricists insist that babies are born into the world with no a priori knowledge thereof, and just a powerful statistical associative learning mechanism by which they piece together their understanding of reality. In reality, it is likely that there are some things that are innate and some things that require learning. Other mechanisms are probably innate but require experience or learning to properly “tune” or “sharpen” the system.”

    This sums it up nicely.

  8. »  but science doesn't work that way: miller and chomsky 1963

    commonunity:

    “In this post, our heroine — spurred on by her godly pursuit of science and a bevy of caffeinated drinks — compares the standard approach to language to intelligent design.  It might get noodly. Does language “emerge” full-blown in children, guided by a hierarchy ofinbuilt grammatical rules for sentence formation and comprehension? Or is language better described as a learned system of conventions — one that is grounded in statistical regularities that give the appearance of a rule-like architecture, but which belie a far more nuanced and intricate structure? For over half a century now, many scientists have believed that the second of these possibilities is a non starter. Why? No one’s quite sure — but it might be because Chomsky told them it was impossible.” posted by melodye in scientopia.

    For an empiricist perspective on language acquisition, with a very brief mention of conceptual development (that, unfortunately, conflates word learning with concept learning), read the article above. As I alluded to in the first post, I’m very much a nativist - I am open to the possibility that certain conceptual content might be innate and, more importantly, that domain-specific learning mechanisms may guide learning in several domains (that is, the way we learn language is not the way we learn about biological entities; the way we learn about the physical world is not the same way we learn about human-made artifacts, etc.). Empiricist theories vary on what they specify to be innate. Some posit certain innate concepts, but they don’t admit to the existence of domain-specific learning mechanisms. While I tend to disagree with many empiricist accounts of the development of cognition, I am still very open to the idea that they might be on to something, and unlike the author of the above article, I am unwilling to stamp the label of “bad science” onto either of these theoretical disciplines.
    That said, feel free to offer your perspectives. I will continue to offer mine.

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  10. »  How Smart Is Your Baby?

    This article above is awesome. Many of the parents who come into the lab are concerned about their baby’s intelligence. They worry if their baby is on track - is their baby smart? Are they keeping up with other babies their age? Is there anything they could be doing to enhance their baby’s cognitive development? Some proudly announce that they are in fact doing all they can - they make sure they only purchase “educational” toys and videos, which they admit are on the pricey side.
    Here is what I have to say about that (and I think the psychologists interviewed in the article would agree):
    1) The best toy is a spoon. It’s cheap, you already have one, babies love them, and they can learn a lot with it. They can bang it against things to make sounds, throw it and see what happens, throw it repeatedly and see how mom and dad react, etc. If you’re going to buy a toy, I happen to be a fan of things like stacking cups and baby legos, which are inexpensive but have many uses.
    2) Make sure your baby hears a lot of talking, whether you’re talking to them, or you’re talking to people around you. You don’t need to teach language to your baby; they are well-equipped to learn it on their own, but they need to hear lots of talking in order to do so!
    3) No television, at least before age two. There is no evidence that babies learn anything from television, and the more television a baby watches, the smaller their vocabulary. TV can make a great baby sitter, but it is one of the worst things for your baby. Rather than watching TV, babies should be exploring the world around them!

    Beyond that, however, I’m wary of any parenting advice that claims to “enhance” your baby’s cognitive development. As long as your baby doesn’t have a developmental disorder, which a doctor would diagnose, most things marketed toward making your baby “smart” probably won’t do much other than burn a hole in your wallet.

About me

exploring the origins of cognition.