Bringing order to the arbitrary: one- to two-year-olds’ recall of event sequences

Wenner, Jennifer; Bauer, Patricia J.

doi:10.1016/s0163-6383(00)00013-8

Cited by 57 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…But these are just a subset of the actions that adults view as intentional. Indeed, many investigators have elucidated infants' developing ability to extract the goals behind observed instrumental actions Meltzoff 1995;Wenner & Bauer 1999;Woodward & Sommerville 2000). Our recent findings are consistent with the thesis that experience contributes to infants' construction of social knowledge; however, in this case what matters appears to be infants' experience of acting on objects rather than of participating in triadic interactions (Sommerville & Woodward, in press).…”

Section: What Infants Know About Intentional Action and How They Mighsupporting

confidence: 84%

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

2004

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Abstract:Theories of children's developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of children's social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child's experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991;. It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of children's social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that children's understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction.Keywords: language; Piaget; social interaction; theories of mind; Vygotsky; Wittgenstein et al. 1998;Symons & Clark 2000), mothers' education (Cutting & Dunn 1999), and socioeconomic circumstances (Holmes et al. 1996).Furthermore, a number of studies have found correlations between language and social understanding (e.g., Cutting & Dunn 1999; de Villers 2000; Happé 1995;Jenkins & Astington 1996). In longitudinal studies, forms of family talk about mental states have been found to be related to later success on false belief tests (e.g., Brown et al. 1996;Dunn et al. 1991a;Ruffman et al. 2002). In addition, mothers who think of their children in mentalistic terms ("mindmindedness"), and therefore, presumably talk to their children about the psychological world, have children who are more advanced in understanding beliefs than are other children (Meins & Fernyhough 1999;Meins et al. 1998). Similar correlations between family interaction and the development of children's understanding of emotions have also been reported (e.g., Dunn et al. 1991b;Hooven et al. 1995;Kuebli et al. 1995;Steele et al. 1999). In a longitudinal study, Astington and Jenkins (1999) found that earlier language abilities predict later false belief performance but earlier false belief competence does not predict later language abilities, supporting the conclusion that language is important in social cognitive development.Another source of evidence that social interaction is important for the development of a mentalistic understanding comes from research with deaf children. A number o...

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Section: What Infants Know About Intentional Action and How They Mighsupporting

confidence: 84%

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

2004

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“…Infants reenact the final goal of a modeled action, but do not always reproduce the means (Gergely, Bekkering, & Kiraly, 2002), suggesting that they recognize the final act as the ultimate goal that governs the sequence. Moreover, toddlers tendency to reenact or remember both entire action sequences (Wenner & Bauer, 1999), and steps within a sequence (Travis, 1997) is influenced by the extent to which these steps bear causal relations to one another and to the goal of the sequence. These findings indicate that the origins of hierarchical action representations are to be found in infancy.…”

Section: The Ontogeny Of Hierarchical Action Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pulling out the intentional structure of action: the relation between action processing and action production in infancy

2005

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Adults and children readily construct action representations organized with respect to an ultimate goal. These representations allow one to predict the consequences of action, interpret and describe actions, and categorize action sequences. In this paper, we explore the ontogeny of hierarchically organized action representations, and its relation to infants' ability to produce similar sequences. To do so, we examine infants' perception and performance of a means-end sequence: pulling a cloth to retrieve a toy. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we demonstrate that 12-month-old infants understand that the initial step of the cloth-pulling sequence is directed toward the ultimate goal of attaining the toy, and use their knowledge of the causal constraints of the sequence to make this goal attribution. Ten-month-olds, however, appear transitional with respect to this understanding: their ability to identify the goal of the cloth-pulling sequence is related to their own ability to planfully solve a similar sequence. These findings are consistent with a burgeoning body of literature suggesting an intimate link between action production and perception, and suggest that this link is in place by at least 10 months of age. q

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“…Bauer and her colleagues have employed a variety of tasks that require the learning of nonlinguistic environmental contingencies, and that very young children appear to learn quickly and retain for extended periods of time (Bauer, 1996;Bauer, Hertsgaard, & Dow, 1994;Bauer, Hertsgaard, & Wewerka, 1995;Wenner & Bauer, 1999). Among the environmental contingency action sequences these authors have employed are those that contain enabling-relation action sequences and those that contain conventional-relation action sequences.…”

Section: Nih Public Accessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temperament, distraction, and learning in toddlerhood

Dixon

Salley

Clements

2006

Infant Behavior and Development

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The word and non-word learning abilities of toddlers were tested under various conditions of environmental distraction, and evaluated with respect to children's temperamental attentional focus. Thirty-nine children and their mothers visited the lab at child age 21-months, where children were exposed to fast-mapping word learning trials and nonlinguistic sequential learning trials. It was found that both word and nonword-learning was adversely affected by the presentation of environmental distractions. But it was also found that the effect of the distractions sometimes depended on children's level of attentional focus. Specifically, children high in attentional focus were less affected by environmental distractions than children low in attentional focus when attempting to learn from a model, whereas children low in attentional focus demonstrated little learning from the model. Translationally, these results may be of use to child health-care providers investigating possible sources of cognitive and language delay. Temperament, Distraction, and Learning in ToddlerhoodThe fields of temperament and cognitive development have followed long and productive paths, even though they seem to have done so in relative isolation from one another. Temperament researchers have made strides in identifying the nature of early temperament and its potential biological underpinnings, and they have identified a host of social-emotional sequelae of early individual differences in temperament (e.g., Guerin, Gottfried, Oliver, & Thomas, 2003;Molfese & Molfese, 2000). Cognitive development researchers have also made significant strides toward understanding basic mechanisms underlying attention (e.g., Colombo, 2004;Richards, 2004;Rose, Feldman, & Jankowski, 2004;Ruff & Rothbart, 1996) and memory (e.g., Bauer, 2004;Hayne, 2004), among other cognitive domains. Unfortunately, few researchers have undertaken empirical efforts to document interrelations between temperament and basic cognition (e.g., Wolfe & Bell, 2004); although Fagen and colleagues have amply demonstrated that aspects of temperamental fussiness (i.e., affective distress) negatively impact children's performance on cognitive tasks (Fagen, Ohr, Fleckenstein, & Ribner, 1985;Fagen, Ohr, Singer, & Fleckenstein, 1987;Fleckenstein & Fagen, 1994). Much would be gained were researchers able to link individual differences in cognitive function to individual differences in any of a number of domains of temperament, because such an effort would likely inform a better understanding of intra domain individual differences.To the extent that temperament-cognitive relationships have been examined, a major focus seems to have been on temperament-language relationships (specifically vocabulary, e.g., Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wallace E. Dixon, Jr., Department of Psychology, East Tennessee State University, P.O. Box 70649, Johnson City, TN,37614. E-mail: dixonw@etsu.edu.. Author Note This work was supported by a NIH/NICHD Grant HD043865 to the first au...

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Bringing order to the arbitrary: one- to two-year-olds’ recall of event sequences

Cited by 57 publications

References 9 publications

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction

Pulling out the intentional structure of action: the relation between action processing and action production in infancy

Temperament, distraction, and learning in toddlerhood

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