A longitudinal study of the development of the object concept

Wishart, Jennifer G.; Bower, T. G. R.

doi:10.1111/j.2044-835x.1985.tb00977.x

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Infants reach not for the smallest or closest of two objects but for segmented surfaces whose boundaries are distinguished from others by separation in depth or motion (von Hofsten & Spelke, 1985). If these segmentation conditions are violated, say by placing a reached-for object directly onto a larger one, reaching is disrupted (Wishart & Bower, 1985). ' The salience of potentially usable information that is made explicit by input descriptions lies in its availability and use at the action program level-hence, in what the subject is trying to do, not in how exhaustively it models things in the world.…”

Section: ~ -mentioning

confidence: 98%

Scaling Up Sensorimotor Systems: Constraints from Human Infancy

Rutkowska

1994

Adaptive Behavior

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Work in human infancy and behavior-based robotics that grounds intelligent abilities in sensorimotor exchanges between a system and its environment shares recurrent problems of when, whether, and how scaling up from basic to supposedly higher abilities is possible. An action-based model of the infant is introduced that converges with features of independently motivated animat models exploiting emergent functionality and challenges alternatives that invoke conceptual representations. Adaptive change routinely exhibited in infants' everyday activities outstrips the scaling-up potential of current robotic systems and clarifies effective principles obeyed by naturally intelligent systems. A general form is outlined to subject-environment interaction that "engineers" restructuring of early abilities in the direction of greater anticipation (considered an upper boundary for the competence of concept-free human and animat systems); and an action-based account of the phenomena is provided. This emphasizes the relationship between representation and situated inference and the role of reciprocal constraints between cognitive and physical-motor mechanisms. Finally, this article questions how far typical self organizing connectionist networks take us toward understanding a system that is capable of mapping recurrent viable patterns of activity into more permanent adaptive changes. , .~, Traditionally, sensorimotor abilities have been of relatively little concern to the mainstream of either artificial intelligence (AI) or developmental psychology. AI's predominantly centralized view of mind has (ab)used the in-principle separation of virtual and physical machines to license preoccupation with disembodied and disembedded programmed models that rely on the manipulation of concepts and of explicit, exhaustive representations to know the world and preplan behavior within it. Developmental psychology has generally allocated sensorimotor abilities to the

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Section: ~ -mentioning

confidence: 98%

Scaling Up Sensorimotor Systems: Constraints from Human Infancy

Rutkowska

1994

Adaptive Behavior

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“…Children with Down's syndrome pass the Piagetian tasks (Cicchetti & Sroufe, 1976) albeit taking additional months to do so (see also, Gunn & Berry, this volume). There is research (Wishart & Bower, 1985) indicating that training can accelerate success on the cognitive development tasks although there is not a full body of work on this point. All of these results suggest that development in infancy is heavily canalizedor, in other words, that it follows a shared, species-specific path (McCall, 1981).…”

Section: Fostering Development In Infancymentioning

confidence: 99%

Social and cognitive development in infancy

Frye

1989

Eur J Psychol Educ

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The relation between social and cognitive development has been important in several accounts of infant development. Piaget's theory specifies that social and cognitive development become significant at eight months and are closely linked thereafter. Brazelton and Trevarthen emphasize the role of social development and social interaction from the first months on. Neither theory predominates today, but studies of new topics such as the infant's discrimination of people and objects may help decide which is correct. In contrast to the question of when infants distinguish the social from the cognitive, it is obvious that the social and physical environments of the child arefundamentally different all along. Adults, and not objects, have expectations for infant development and adjust their behaviour in line with those expectations. The research on developmental outcome preserves this difference. Cognitive development in infancy proceeds normally in a great many environments. Social development, on the other hand, has been found to vary with the characteristics of the caregiver. This difference between social and cognitive development is interpretable in terms of the difference between the social and physical worlds.A quarter century of intensive research has established how very remarkable development in infancy is. In the time from birth to the end of infancy at about two years of age, babies come to see, recognize, manipulate and use objects. They acquire a practical understanding of the basic properties of the world. The know that objects are three dimensional, occupy space and obey the laws of causality. Over the same period infants also gain the essential elements of social knowledge. They not only form specific relationships with individual people, but they identify people as a special class. Babies recognize that people carry out actions, show affect, and respond to looks, signals and words. Indeed, babies are so accomplished regarding all of these distinctions that at two years they can routinely carry out a conversation with another person about common objects in the world.The rapid progress of infant development in both the cognitive and social realms raises the question of the relationship between the two. How do early cognitive and social developments intermingle? Do the physical and social worlds always exist for the child or does one precede the other. For instance, babies could understand the physical world first and then place people in it. Alternatively, all early knowledge may be social -derived from interactions with people -and only later is the physical world deciphered. It may even be that development in one of these domains drives or controls the other. Answers to these questions have clear educational importance because they help identify the environments and experiences that can best support and sustain early development.

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“…Visually-directed search might be a more appropriate behavioural index of understanding in this group of children at these young age levels, although visual tracking behaviours can be much more time-consuming to analyse and more difficult to interpret than manual search patterns (see e.g. Wishart and Bower, 1985).…”

Section: Performance On Object Concept Tasks At Older Agesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although it is known that repeated exposure to object concept tasks can lead to accelerated development (Wishart and Bower, 1985) and although clearly this effect was greater in normally developing children than in children with Down's syndrome (see Table 1), it is nevertheless important to register that many of these children with Down's syndrome managed to reach the levels of understanding required to succeed on this task more or less on time, no mean achievement given the very strict criteria adopted in this study and their inherent cognitive disadvantage.…”

Section: Performance On Object Concept Tasks At Older Agesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Criteria for attributing success/failure on each level of task were drawn from an earlier cross-sectional study of object concept development in 228 normally-developing infants aged between 4 and 22 months (Wishartand Bower, 1984) and from a longitudinal training study in which 24 infants (again, normally-developing) had been tested regularly with object concept tasks from the age at which they could first reach (Wishart and Bower, 1985). To be credited with achievement of any given stage, children were required to pass all four trials of the appropriate level of object concept task in two consecutive testing sessions.…”

Section: The Edinburgh Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Learning the hard way: Avoidance strategies in young children with Down syndrome

Wishart¹

1993

Downs Syndr. Res. Pract.

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This paper overviews findings from a series of studies of cognitive development in children with Down's syndrome aged between birth and 5 years. These studies provide evidence of the persistence and elaboration of a particularly inefficient learning 'style' during these early years, one which affects both the acquisition and consolidation phases of learning. The ability levels demonstrated at very young ages were surprisingly high but instead of building on these skills, many children simply allowed them to deteriorate. Consolidation of new skills was compromised by poorly motivated performance on 'easy' tasks while the avoidance strategies produced in response to 'difficult' tasks resulted in many learning opportunities being missed. Implications of these findings are discussed and in relation to assesssment, the importance of awareness of the inherent instability in developmental processes in children with Down's syndrome is stressed.

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A longitudinal study of the development of the object concept

Cited by 15 publications

References 18 publications

Scaling Up Sensorimotor Systems: Constraints from Human Infancy

Scaling Up Sensorimotor Systems: Constraints from Human Infancy

Social and cognitive development in infancy

Learning the hard way: Avoidance strategies in young children with Down syndrome

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