Infant development from Piaget to today

 

Invited speakers

Richard Aslin, University of Rochester
Renée Baillargeon,University of Illinois
Paul Bloom, Yale University
Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington
Thierry Nazzi, Université Paris Descartes
Olivier Pascalis, Université Pierre Mendès-France, Grenoble
Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard University
Karen Wynn, Yale University

par Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington

Imitation is a key mechanism of human learning. Human infants use imitation of adults to learn about physical objects, causal relations, and cultural practices. Infant imitation requires a close mapping between action perception and action production. This mapping can now be described at both the psychological level, and increasingly at the neural level. In this talk I will outline the “Like-Me” hypothesis. It proposes that one of the infant’s first and most basic psychological acts is the recognition of others who act, move, and behave like the self. This theoretical proposal, based on behavioral studies, is aligned with emerging findings in developmental cognitive neuroscience. My recent work investigates the neural correlates of infant imitation, using EEG and MEG to examine action coding and neural body maps. I will discuss infants’ representation of human action, the impact of early self-other mapping in infants’ understanding of people, and mechanisms of change in social-cognitive development. Finally, I will examine the how modern findings about infant imitation relate to Piaget’s original theory of sensorimotor intelligence, considering Piaget as an ancestor for current views about imitation and the origins of social cognition.

par Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard University

Over the course of cognitive development, Piaget argued that children develop new and more powerful concepts. These concepts, he maintained, emerge neither through associative learning nor through the blind unfolding of maturational processes, but rather through constructive processes that build on experiences tracing back to infancy. This position was criticized in the 1970s and 1980s, by cognitive scientists who argued against the very possibility that more powerful concepts could be constructed on the basis of less powerful ones (e.g., Fodor, 1975). Here I suggest that Piaget’s picture of conceptual development in childhood prevails over those arguments, and that apparent contradictions in his theory disappear if it is viewed in light of subsequent research on cognition in infancy. Piaget underestimated the perceptual and cognitive capacities of infants: capacities that came to light long after his own seminal studies. Thus, many of his claims concerning the initial cognitive competences of infants were mistaken, but his more central theory of conceptual development may well be correct. I review some key findings concerning infants’ conceptual capacities and then focus on new evidence supporting a version of his claims for conceptual change in the domain of number.

par Thierry Nazzi, University Paris Descartes

Nespor et al. (2003) proposed a functional dissociation in language processing, according to which consonants would be given more weight than vowels in lexical processing, and vowels would be given more weight than consonants in prosodic/syntactic processing. Accordingly, we investigated the proposed consonant bias at the lexical level both from a crosslinguistic and developmental perspective. Crosslinguistically, the C-bias was found to be pervasive in French and Italian, while a different pattern wase found in English (late emergence of the C-bias) and in Danish (observation of a V-bias). This variation suggests that the originally proposed C-bias is language-modulated. Developmentally, lexically-related studies focusing on French-learning infants between 5 and 11 months suggest that these infants switch from an early V-bias around 5/6 months of age to a functional C-bias around 8/11 months. We will discuss these findings in relation to early phonological and (pre)lexical developments.

par Richard Aslin, University of Rochester

Classic views of the sensory-motor period during infancy emphasize the role of action in discovering structured information in the environment. While there is no question that action is a powerful tool for learning, research in the past two decades has revealed another powerful tool - the extraction of structure from the environment by mere exposure. That is, observation of events that contain either temporal or spatial structure as defined by the distribution of elements within those events can lead infants to learn those structures, despite no overt action on the part of the infant. It has been argued that these demonstrations of "statistical learning" in infancy are limited because they do not generalize to novel events (i.e., they are not rule-based). I will argue that this conclusion is unwarranted – the patterning of the input enables a learner to either generalize or to treat the specifics of the input as unique (i.e., as exceptions rather than rules). In turn, the contrast between learning the input and generalizing from it can serve to bias future learning, thereby enabling the transition to a more mature developmental level.
 

par Olivier Pasqualis, University Pierre Mendès-France, Grenoble

The contrast of early experiences being fundamental to a child’s social, emotional and cognitive development and the fact that most adults report very few memories from before 2- or 3-years of age has created a massive literature. It has been suggested for a long time that only procedural memory was present during the first years of life. The neural network supporting explicit memory being immature the young infant may be unable to store “episodic” information in an accessible form. Twenty years ago, Nelson (1995) has proposed that, in primates, both memory systems are present at birth, although the declarative system may exist in an immature form, referred to as pre-declarative memory, due to the immaturity of cortical inputs to the hippocampus. I am going to review the literature and argue that childhood amnesia is a complex issue in which the development of several cognitive functions interfere with the brain maturity.

par Paul Bloom, Yale University

One of the most surprising discoveries in contemporary developmental psychology is that babies apparently possess a rich moral sense. They distinguish between good and bad acts and prefer good characters over bad ones. They feel compassion for others, and even possess a primitive sense of fairness and justice. Based on these findings, many scholars have argued that the difference between baby morality and adult morality is slight—a matter of degree, not of kind. I will suggest that this is mistaken. It turns out that the morality of a baby has a very different character than that of an adult. In some regards, it is better. Certain intuitions that only adults possess, having to do the moralization of purity and disgust, make us worse people—we were better off as babies. In other regards, though, our innate morality is limited, tragically so. Piaget and Kohlberg were correct to maintain that an impartial and disinterested moral system—one that takes the perspective of an “impartial spectator”—is the product of a lengthy developmental process. There is an important sense, then, in which we are not moral from the very start.

par Karen Wynn, Yale University

As members of a highly social species, humans must be able to evaluate the actions and intentions of the people around us, to identify our allies and adversaries and to make accurate decisions about who is likely to be a trustworthy social partner and who is not. Even in the first few months of life, these processes are vigorously operative in young humans: infants evaluate others on the basis of their actions and intentions towards third parties. These judgments share some of the features of mature moral judgments, and thus may form the developmental foundations of our rich system of moral cognition. 

par Renée Baillargeon, University of Illinois

What sociomoral principles guide early expectations about interactions among individuals? My presentation will focus on four candidate principles: fairness, harm avoidance, ingroup support, and authority. In our experiments, infants and toddlers watch third-party interactions among unfamiliar individuals. Following the minimum-group paradigm, group memberships are specified using salient markers such as novel labels or outfits. Our experiments examine (a) what expectations infants and toddlers possess with respect to each principle, (b) how these expectations interact in situations where two or more principles apply, and (c) how children’s experience with their particular socio-cultural environments affects these initial expectations and interactions. Together, our results suggest that a rich and abstract capacity for sociomoral reasoning emerges early in development.

Actes de colloque

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