par Adèle Diamond, University of British Columbia

The brain does not recognize the same sharp division between cognitive,
motor, emotional, and social functioning that we impose in our thinking. Our
reasoning, self-control, ability to hold information in mind and work with it,
and mental flexibility (that is, our ‘executive functions’) are better when we
have had enough sleep and exercise, are not stressed, and feel emotionally and socially nourished. Conversely, executive functions, and the prefrontal cortex on which they depend, suffer most and first if we are sad, stressed, lonely, or not physically fit. (You may have noticed that when stressed or sad you can’t think as clearly or exercise as good self-control.) Each of us has cognitive, physical, emotional, and social needs. We ignore any one of them at our peril.
What we are learning about the brain is turning some ideas about
education on their head. Research shows that activities that are getting
squeezed out of school curricula – such as the arts, physical exercise, and play -- are excellent for developing executive functions and therefore for success in school. The arts have never respected the arbitrary separation of heart, mind, and body. For thousands of years, people in all cultures told stories and passed down information by word of mouth, made music, sang, danced, and played.
Why have those activities lasted so long and arisen everywhere? Perhaps it is
because they address all aspects of the human being -- our cognitive,
emotional, social, and physical needs. What nourishes the human spirit may
also best for executive functions and cognitive development.

par Philip Zelazo, University of Minnesota

The development of executive function—the conscious control of thought, action, and emotion—has consequences for children’s behavior in a wide variety of domains. In this talk, I will present a neurocognitive model of executive function and its development according to which:

(1) age-related improvements in executive function are brought about in part via increases in the extent to which children reprocess and reflect upon their experiences in order to formulate action plans maintained in working memory; (2) these cognitive and behavioral changes, in turn, are associated with the experience-dependent maturation of neural systems involving anterior cingulate cortex and lateral prefrontal cortex (inter alia).

I will also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of experimental research aimed at promoting the healthy development of executive function during the preschool period.

par Susan Carey, Harvard University, Cambridge

Piaget's rich body of work is the foundation of modern field of conceptual
development, and different research traditions lay claims to carrying on his
legacy. The "neo-Piagetians" of the late 20th century sought to cash out Piaget's stage theories in terms of domain general changes in informational processing capacities. Constructivists, in contrast, sought to illuminate the nature of qualitative changes in conceptual content at a domain specific level, focusing on theory changes and changes in expressive power within mathematical development. Both of these were important threads of Piaget's own work. For example, in The Child's Concept of Quantity, Piaget and Inhelder offered two theoretical interpretations of the developmental changes on tasks that diagnosed children's concepts of substance quantities such a amount of stuff, weight, volume and density. The first placed the observed changes in the context of developmental changes in the child's intuitive theory of matter, and the second in the context of the transitions between preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational thought. I will use a case study of developments within intuitive biology as an example of theory change and work on executive function as an example changes in cognitive architecture at a domain general level to illustrate how these two legacies of Piaget's work play out today.

par Robert Siegler, Carnegie Mellon University

The modern field of numerical development examines knowledge of whole
numbers and fractions among non-human animals, infants, children, and adults using cross-sectional, longitudinal, microgenetic, and intervention designs and behavioral and neuroscience methods. This talk presents a theory of numerical development intended to integrate this sprawling area within a single framework.

par Rochel Gelman, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Piaget made three assumptions about number concepts: they are based on a
logical mental structure of one to one correspondence, that efforts to train
conservation of number will fail because the requisite Concrete Operational
mental structure has yet to develop; and the counting of preschool children was uninteresting because it was just memorized. I trained conservation and finally gave in to children who kept asking, “can I count.” There is now a cottage industry studying counting, both nonverbal and verbal. Less emphasized (or accepted) is that counting is done in the service of arithmetic reasoning. I will emphasize the critical role of verbally expressed mathematical operations, first using some data from school-aged children. Of special interest will be the transition to the use and understanding of mathematical operations and their deployment in relation to the mathematical re-representation system.

par Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago

The spontaneous gestures that people produce when they talk have been shown to reflect a speaker’s thoughts––they can index moments of cognitive instability and reflect thoughts not yet found in speech. Gesture can also go beyond reflecting thought to play a role in changing that thought––the gestures we see others produce can change our thoughts, and the gestures we ourselves produce can change our thoughts. In this talk, I consider whether gesture effects these changes because it itself is an action and can thus bring action into our mental representations. But gesture is a special kind of action––it spatializes ideas, even ideas that are inherently non-spatial, and it is representational and more abstract than direct action on objects. Gesture’s representational properties may thus allow it to play a role in learning by facilitating the transition from action to abstraction.

par David F. Bjorklund , Florida Atlantic University

Evolutionary developmental psychology involves the study of the genetic and
environmental mechanisms that underlie the universal development of social
and cognitive competencies and how these processes adapt to local conditions. I present some of the central issues and concepts of evolutionary developmental psychology: (1) natural selection operates at all stages of the lifespan, but especially early in life; (2) an extended childhood is needed in which to learn the complexities of human social communities; (3) the application of a developmental contextual (epigenetic) approach to explain how evolved and inherited dispositions become expressed as adaptive behaviors in the phenotypes of adults; (4) development is constrained by both genetic and environmental factors; and (5) children show substantial plasticity of cognition and behavior, and adaptive sensitivity to context early in life.

par Josef Perner, University of Salzburg

Vertical Décalage was Piaget’s term for describing the phenomenon that
knowledge available at the sensori-motor stage had to be re-acquired at the
symbolic level a few years later. A similar phenomenon seems to be the hot
topic in theory of mind research these days. Infants as young as 14 months (or even 6 months) anticipate a mistaken agent’s erroneous action in their looking and in their cooperative behaviour but cannot answer a question about this action correctly until they are about 4 years old, as shown in the traditional false belief test. I will outline the main attempts at accounting for this discrepancy. Nativist inspired theorists see an innate ability being hampered by performance demands which centre on the requirement to follow the agent’s circumstances and at the same time engage in a conversation with the experimenter. Content oriented theorists see a change in what children know (this change need not be through learning, it could be maturation of genetically preformed knowledge). This change can be viewed as a deepening of the causal analysis of how what one knows about the agent (as inferred from behaviour in present circumstances) causes future behaviour. A very shallow understanding uses observed behaviour to predict future behaviour (“behaviour rules”). A deeper understanding requires representation of the agent’s mental states. However, there are also shallower and deeper analyses possible. Infants might only represent the content of the agent’s belief and think of corresponding behaviour without understanding that this content is held as a belief. Ilustrative empirical
findings for the various positions will be given.

par Philippe Rochat, Emory University, Atlanta

Since the seminal work of Piaget, conceptions of child development have
drastically changed. Advances in infancy research forced novel developmental theories away from radical empiricism, orderly constructionism or structuralism, putting more weight on both evolved biological mechanisms and the role culture plays in child development. Based on my research and other selected empirical evidence, I present an “onion” metaphor of development by which children would grow from an implicit biologically given core at birth - distinct layers of awareness about objects, people, and the self. Each added layer of subjective experience corresponds to major qualitative shifts: the emergence of a contemplative stance by 2 months, self consciousness from around 21 months and the manifestation of an ethical stance from approximately 3-5 years. In place of a general developmental mechanism, I propose that they are some basic and universal socio-affective conundrums constraining children to develop predictable behavioral patterns such as joint attention, self-consciousness, the exacerbated sentiment of having ownership, and the propensity to negotiate values with others. All are seen as special features of human development, linked to the incomparably prolonged immaturity and social dependence of children that is the trademark of our species. As part of the multi-layer onion metaphor, I propose that a new layer of awareness emerging in development does not block, re-construct, or
fundamentally re-structure “à la Piaget” the expression of those ontogenetically anterior. Rather, each layer offers a particular zone of awareness through which we constantly navigate depending on the mind state of our being in the world: dozing and dreaming, implicitly or explicitly aware, co-aware, conscious, or co-conscious. My main purpose is to show that what develop in children between birth and 5 years are additional ranges of subjective experience, new possibilities of being aware in the world.

par Patricia Bauer, Emory University, Atlanta

The ability to re-present past events and experiences is a keystone of mental
life. The period of infancy is marked by slow yet significant development of this foundational capacity, eventually culminating in the ability to recall specific past events over long periods of time. Subsequent developmental changes in memory and associated cognitive processes permit embellishment of basic memory re-presentions into autobiographical or personal memories, which serve as the foundation upon which is constructed a continuous sense of self over time. This presentation will chronicle these changes in behavior, link them to changes in basic cognitive and neural processes, and explore their implications for our understanding of the mechanisms of development.

par Charles Brainerd, Cornell University

Fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) is a lifespan model of cognitive development that
concentrates on the interface between memory development and the
development of higher reasoning abilities. A key finding has been that gist
memory (storing the bottom-line meaning of experience) drives the
development of reasoning, whereas the development of episodic memory
depends more heavily on verbatim memory. Different lines of experimentation
have focused on the relative independence of reasoning from the development of verbatim memory, on implementing developmental changes in memory and reasoning in mathematical models (e.g., the conjoint recognition and dual retrieval models), on counterintuitive memory phenomena that result from the interplay of gist and verbatim memory (e.g., cognitive triage), and on counterintuitive reasoning phenomena that result from such interplay (e.g., the non-numerical basis for numerical illusions such as decision framing and the conjunction fallacy). Developmental reversals are an especially counterintuitive family of phenomena that cut across the memory and reasoning domains. Recent lines of experimentation have focused on brain regions where the development of verbatim and gist memory are centered (e.g., the hippocampus and the parietal cortex), and on the use of FTT’s distinctions to explain the nature of the memory and reasoning declines that characterize certain diseases of aging (e.g., mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s dementia).