Summary prepared by Adam Chazan (additions and comments by Frawley)
Before discussing cognitive development, one must make sure to consciencely make an effort to watch out for metaphors. Specifically, there are three metaphors that we must be careful of: less to more, simple to complex, and ego to other. The concept that less becomes more may not apply when talking about cognitive development. Humans may have just what they need when they are born. The concept that simple becomes complex, likewise, may not apply either (especially if you look at development in other areas of the organism: is the immune system in its initial state simple, developing more complex as the organism gwrows?). There is also almost no way of knowing if the child is self contained and then becomes like people, or if you areoriginally an "other," and become a self. Again, one must consider that usual logic may not apply when discussing cognitive development.
The first idea we discussed in class was that development is the development of SOMETHING. First, we must decide what is being developed. Then, we must figure out what lack is being filled (presuming that development means "growth"). In class, we talked about the development of movement. We came up with the claim that loco-motor skills were being developed. The lack that was being filled was motor control. Finally, when talking about the development of x, one must consider what it means to say that there are stages in development. Stages in development would imply that there could be either continuity or discontinuity in the child's mind. Continuity is the idea that the child maintains the same states and has everything it needs at birth. Discontinuity states that interaction with others produces more knowledge. Jerry Fodor, who studied the language of thought, believed that continuity was the only possibility. He argued that if the language of thought were like sentences, where knowlege tests the truth of hypotheses in sentence-like form, humans would need full brain capacity when they are young to test the truth of their thoughts.
That is, Fodor argues that the language of thought must have all the representational power it needs at birth to test hypotheses.
We also discussed the idea that like adding memory to a computer in order for it to deal with more information, humans add nueron connections in their brains to deal with more information.
The second idea in discussing cognitive develpment is the form of development. When dealing with this, one must first answer some questions about stages.What are the criteria for stages? What shape are the stages, and how are they distributed? What is the applicability of these stages? Second, one must talk about the trajectory of development. When dealing with development studies we must remember that averages are only averages and that properties of the population are different from properties of the individuals in the population.
In class we discussed the stages of acquisition of grammatical morphenes. The child first learns present participles, then prepositions, then the plural "s," then irregular pasts, and finally the possesive "s." This sequence has a linear increase; however, not all curves have to. The shape of a graph depends on if development ends, continues, falls down, or levels off. There is a U-shaped curves that applies to the development of tenses. Initially, the child learns "went," then learns "goed," or "wented," and finally returns to the proper "went."
Some questions: does this U-shaped development reflect continuous or discontinuous development? What is thas cause of this U-shaped, stage-like behavior? Input? Pinker and others show that it is not a function of input. Internal reorganization and hypothesis testing?
Some notes on Susan Carey's observations on development. She argues in the Osherson volume that elementary number knowldge displays discontinuous development while category knowledge is continuous. As to the former, she observes that while children do exhibit what appears to be counting via a mental list (cf. Gelman) -- hence continuity, there is also evidence that their counting behavior for the first year, at least, is more like a ritualized game than true numerical manipulation. If so, then mathematical knowledge develops discontinuously, from a rituailzed sequencing game to seriation via an abstract mental list.As to the latter, she recounts the substantial evidence that children at a very young age see an object not only as an individual but also a kind (`thing'). This occurs over the counter-cues of the syntax of the language: i.e., they sort on the judgment of solids and substances before they sort on the syntax of count and mass nouns.