25th Annual Symposium

Paper Sessions

Back to: | Table of Contents for this issue | GE Home Page | JPS Home Page |

Theoretical Perspectives on Development

Chair: TERRANCE BROWN

Beyond Modularity in Language Development: Paradigm Explosion and Dynamic Systems Theory
HELGA FEIDER, Département de psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the major paradigms in language acquisition research: Parameter setting and rule learning theory (Pinker et al. 1992), functionalist theories using connectionist modeling (Bates et al. 1992, 1994) or more informal contextual theories of grammar acquisition (Snow & Ninio, 1989), and Karmiloff-Smith's model (1993) of representational redescription (RR model), with a view towards a possible synthesis and future research in two specific subfields: early learning of speech sounds and reading acquisition. Il is argued that the currently available findings on language acquisition might fruitfully be accomodated within dynamic systems theory.

A Dynamic Systems Interpretation of Universal Developmental Stages
MARC D. LEWIS, Centre for Applied Cognitive Science, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Dynamic systems approaches to cognitive development have generally argued against the existence of universal stages. However, both normative and idiosyncratic features may characterize self-organizing cognitive configurations for children at particular ages. Normative constraints on cognitive development can act locally within self-organizing processes by guiding the coactivation of elements which participate in developmental feedback. These elements, in normative structure may become embedded within individually assembled cognitive constellations, and these seeds may help to configure cognitive-developmental stages with shared features across individual children.

Evolution of a Developmental Science: Early Determinism, Modern Interactionism and a New Systemic Approach
JEAN-LOUIS GARIƒPY, Developmental Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Modern interactionism maintains that behavior is a product of organism-environment interactions. Instead, I propose that behavioral activity is at the origin of a process that brings intra-and extraorganismic conditions into functional alignment. This proposal rests on an analysis of what constitutes an adapted state, how functional relationships with the environment are established and how they are supported. Accordingly, the study of continuity and change in adaptations begins with an analysis of the cognitive/behavioral accommodations observed in the short-term, along with appropriately time-framed analyses of the supportive changes taking place in the other systems of the organism and the environment.

Does Cognition Develop Beyond Childhood?
DAVID MOSHMAN, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Puberty is a prototypical example of a developmental change. There is substantial evidence for the existence of cognitive changes, including some extending beyond childhood, that are sufficiently like puberty to be labeled "cognitive development." In particular, there are changes in cognition during adolescence and early adulthood that are long-term, progressive, qualitative, and internally directed. Not everything we call "cognitive development," however, has all those characteristics that lead us to construe puberty as a developmental change. In particular, it is not clear that later cognitive changes are general, universal, genetically driven, or aimed at any specific endpoint.

Discussant: JEANNETTE McCARTHY GALLAGHER, Lehigh University

Social Cognition I

Chair: NANCY NORDMANN, National-Louis University

Children's Representation of Cooperation: A Socio Developmental Perspective
CATHERINE GARNIER, Université du Québec à Montréal

To communicate with their peers children need to develop their comprehension of their functioning in groups. This is possible when they have a good representation of their group's activities, and in particular of cooperation. To study how in a social context the representation of cooperation is structured and what kind of transformation appears during development, five groups of six children each, 2, 3, and 4 year old were questionned during free play about their collective activity. The analysis shows the importance of group and day-care center culture in the structuring of cooperation representation.

What's Happening Here? How Children With Autism Interpret Social Interaction: Study and Replication
LINDA J. BRANDT, DONNA K. ZUBRIS, LISA GILOTTY, George Washington University

These investigations examined the ability of children with developmental disabilities to gain information from social interactions. Recent investigations suggest children with autism, in particular, show deficits in understanding others' feelings. In this study and replication, autistic, mentally retarded and normal preschool children were shown live presentations with positive and negative outcomes. They identified the affective content pictorially. The Columbia Mental Maturity Scale and Childhood Autism Rating Scale were used to compared clinical subjects groups. There was no difference between autistic and mentally retarded children's accuracy in identifying affect in live presentations in Study I or II. These results are decidedly more optimistic on autistic children's understanding of human behavior.

Facilitating False Belief Performance in Autism
TONY CHARMAN & HENRIK LYNGGAARD, Department of Psychology, University College London

The posting manipulation, which Mitchell and Lacohée (1991) successfully employed to facilitate false belief task performance in normally-developing 3-year-olds, was employed with subjects with autism. Unexpectedly there was no autism-specific impairment on the standard false belief task, compared to mental handicap and normal controls. However, a significant facilitative effect was found on the posting false belief task for all subject groups. The results are consistent with several competing hypotheses regarding the facilities effect of the posting manipulationk, and other strategies which demonstrate enhanced false belief performance. The fact that false belief task performance can be facilitated in autism may tell us something about the mechanism by which at least some subjects with autism are able to pass the standard task, as well as the task demands of the false belief task itself.

The Relationship Between Social Cognition and Relationship Patterns in At-Risk Adolescents
KAREN HOFFMAN, University of Massachusetts at Boston, JENNIFER EKERT, Harvard University, GIL G. NOAM, Harvard University Graduate School of Education

This longitudinal study examines the relationship between ego development and attachment in a sample of 100 at-risk adolescents. Two pathways were established: progressors, those subjects who had advanced at least one-half stage in ego development, and nonprogressors, those who had not. These ego pathways were related to symptoms and recovery. Qualitative analyses were necessary in order to establish a typology of the relationship between development and adaptation. Specifically, ego nonprogressors with externalizing symptoms were compared with ego progressors who developed more internalized problems. Data from qualitative interviews provided a more detailed description of the relational quality of at-risk adolescents who fall into four categories: nonprogressors with and without externalizing symptoms, as well as progressors with and without internalizing symptoms. These findings create possibilities for the beginning of a model that related social cognition to relationship patterns in adolescence.

Discussant: CHARLES HELWIG, University of Toronto

Animal Cognition

Chair: THOMAS BIDELL, Boston College

Systematic Search in an Avian species in Object Permanence Tasks
MILDRED FUNK, Roosevelt University

Eleven Young New Zealand Parakeets (Cyanoramphus auriceps) were tested on 15 Object Permanence tasks in a standardized scale that has been used to assess the development of human infants and some nonhuman primates and other mammals in this cognitive domain. The birds successfully completed all the tasks, preforming like human subjects on many aspects of the Piagetian testing. Unlike many previous subjects tested, however, all the avian subjects spontaneously performed systematic searches of three covers under which they saw a hidden object moved. The birds' foraging activities in the wild may partly explain their use of this search method.

Logical Structures in Young Chimpanzees' Spontaneous Object Manipulation
PATRIZIA POTI', Istituto di Psicologia, CNR via U. Aldrovandi, Roma, Italia

Spontaneous object grouping was examined in 5 common chimpanzees ranging from 1 to 4 years of age. Emphasis was on the transformational actions carried out on co-existing groups. Such logical properties of coordinations of actions as equivalence, order and reversibility, were analyzed. Compared to human infants 1 to 2 years old, chimpanzees similarly increased simultaneous grouping acts and also developed equivalence relations before order relations. However, these chimpanzees did not develop spatial correspondences or reversibility structures, that is they did not put objects into stabile spatial configurations to carry the logical characters of coordinations of actions.

Liquid Conservation in Orangutans and Humans: Individual Differences and Cognitive Strategies
JOSEP CALL & PHILIPPE ROCHAT, Department of Psychology & Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Emory University, Altanta

For juvenile and adult orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and ten 6- to 8-year-old children were tested in four liquid conservations tasks, each corresponding to a particular level of difficulty. Tasks' difficulty depended on the type of transformation (continuous to continuous quantities vs. continuous to discontinuous quantities), and the relative contrast between the shapes of the containers. Results suggest that all orangutans displayed "partial" conservation (intermediary reactions). In contrast, some of the children were conservant in all 4 experiments, showing "true" or logically necessary conservation in the sense proposed by Piaget & Inhelder. Although not conservant in the strict sense, orangutans behave as problem solvers, adopting different cognitive strategies depending on the task.

Social Modulation of Performance on Learning Tasks in Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta)
CHRISTINE M. DREA, University of California KIM WALLEN, Emory University and Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center

Subordinate rhesus monkeys perform poorly, compared to dominant animals, on discrimination tasks presented to social groups. This study addressed whether meager performance reflected inferior cognitive abilities, failure to learn, or failure to express learned behavior. Hypotheses were tested by comparing subordinate and dominant performance on tasks presented in different social contexts. Subordinates showed proficiency when allowed to solve problems amid peers but performed poorly in the presence of dominants, regardless of learning history, suggesting their poor performance reflected failure to express learned behavior. Results show how the social environment can modulate performance and how status can interact with learning history to influence competency.

Discussant: VALERIE AHL, University of Wisconsin

Theory of Mind I

Chair: MARC LEWIS, OISE

The Child's Theory of Mind: Understanding Others' False Beliefs
ANNE-CATHERINE ROCH-LEVECQ, University of California, San Diego, JERRY A. FODOR AND JOAN STILES, Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science and Cuny Graduate Center

Children before 4 years fail to predict the right action of another person on the basis of what this person thinks because the context of a false belief is not explicit enough. A "training" phase provided the belief cues under three conditions: the child could experience a deception either as a(n) "accomplice", "victim" or "conspirator". A baseline and a post-training test, identical to the false belief paradigm, assessed 36 3-and-half-year-olds" performance. It improved significantly on the "accomplice" and "conspirator" conditions, but remained at its initial level in the "victim" condition, although 75% of the children tested in this condition could identify correctly their own false belief.

Three-Year-Old's Knowledge of Own and Other's Mental States: Clues from Discourse Strategies
KATHERINE NELSON, DANIELA PLESA, SYLVIE GOLDMAN, City University of New York Graduate Center

Current theories of children's theory of mind (TOM) focus on representations of mental states of desire and belief. The present hypothesis is that children's experientially based representations of actions and events are the initial basis for their predictions in theory of mind tasks. Subsequently, others' verbal expression of different knowledge states provides the basis for collaborative construction of beliefs, their sources and their causal outcomes. Analysis of responses in a task asking children to explain their answers to standard TOM questions reveals children's systematic discourse strategies, discrepancies between adult and child meaning, focus on action and desire, and logical gaps in reasoning, supporting predicted developments.

Factors Affecting Children's Deception
STEPHANIE M. CARLSON & LOUIS J. MOSES, Department of Psychology, University of Oregon.

Study 1 compared 64 3 and 4 year olds' ability to "trick" an experimenter under anonymous (pictorial cue) versus public (pointing) conditions. Four year olds performed well in both conditions but 3 years olds deceived significantly more in the anonymous condition. False belief performance improved with age and was significantly better in a deceptive than a standard context. Study 2 constrated deception using an arrow both anonymously and publicly with a pointing condition in 48 3 year olds. Deception was significantly greater in the two arrow conditions that the pointing condition. Pointing is not a reliable mode of assessing deception in 3 year olds, perhaps due to inhibitory control deficits. Thus, young children might have more sophisticated deceptive abilities than some earlier studies suggested.

False Beliefs Attribution, Distinction Between Appearance and Reality and Visual Perspective Taking: Do They Develop Simultaneously?
A.M. MELOT, O. HOUDE, S. COURTEL, L. SOENEN, LaPsyDEE, Paris

The objective of this research is to test the hypothesis of the existence of a common process that could account for performance patterns observed in several tasks of theory of mind in preschool children. Three tasks (false belief attribution, appearance/reality distinction and perceptual perspective taking) were give to 72 three, four and five-year-old children. It appears that: 1) All three tasks are positively correlated; 2) The visual perspective taking items are succeeded earlier than those of the A/R and false belief items; and 3) There is a relational implication between perspective taking tasks on the one hand and A/R and false belief tasks on the other. That is to say, it seems that the mastery of perspective taking tasks is necessary for the success on A/R and false belief tasks.

Discussant: PATRICIA MILLER, University of Florida

Theory of Mind II

Chair: JAMES P. BYRNES, University of Maryland

Infants' Understanding of Beliefs
DIANE POULIN-DUBOIS, JOANNE TILDEN & BARBARA LEVINE, Concordia University

Implicit understanding of how beliefs influence people's actions and emotional states was assessed in 18-month-old infants with the preferential looking paradigm. Subjects were shown videotaped events in which an actor was first shown to acquire a belief (e.g., knowledge of the presence of an object underneath a container). They were then shown two events which were congruent and incongruent with the actor's belief (e.g., surprise or neutral facial expression when object has disappeared). The pattern of responses suggest that 18-month-old infants understand that the emotion of surprise is dependent upon beliefs, but do not seem to recognize that beliefs guide actions.

Social Understanding in Infancy
CHRIS MOORE, Dalhousie University

Infant social behaviors, such as joint attention, have commonly been taken as evidence of considerable social understanding and as deeply inconsistent with Piaget's notions of infant egocentrism. In this paper, I suggest that these phenomena are entirely compatible with an account which does not attribute to the infant any sophisticated undestanding of the psychological states of self or others. My alternative is broadly Piagetian in the sense that I claim that infants understand the psychological properties of people only to the extent that they can act in relation to people. Thus, the initial understanding of the psychological activity of others is tied to the infant's own psychological activity. Coordination of psychological activity with others provides infants with the appropriate experiences to develop an undestanding of the nature of psychological activity.

A Nonverbal Theory of Mind Task
JOSEP CALL & MICHAEL TOMASELLO, Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center.

A nonverbal "theory of mind" task is described. The task consists of a finding game in which the child must base her search procedures on her knowledge that one adult has tricked another into having a false belief about an objet's location. The task was given to 61 children, aged 3;11 to 5;7. The children also received a traditional false belief task in which they were asked to imagine where an adult would look after an object was surreptitiously moved to a new location. Results showed that the two tasks were highly correlated and were of comparable difficulty (with both becoming easier for older children). Therefore, the new false belief task may be validly used to test the "theory of mind" of nonverbal children and other organisms.

Early Individual Differences in "Mindreading"
ANNE WATSON O'REILLY, West Virginia University

Empirical investigations of individual differences in the ability to understand mental phenomena and the mechanisms through which these differences influence development, are a critical next step in our continuing exploration of the child's "theory of mind". While past research has focused on the preschool years, examination of the earliest manifestations of "mindreading", as realized in biologically-based perceptual and behavioral tendencies, will make a valuable contribution to our understanding in this area. This paper will discuss current work and make specific suggestions about future directions.

Discussant: MICHAEL CHANDLER, University of British Columbia

Evolution and Development

Chair: PETER PUFALL, Smith College

Piaget on Infants Acting on Objects: The Evolutionary Basis For Equal Property Norms
JAY G. HOOK, Division of Continuing Education, Harvard University

According to Piaget, the sensorimotor child's acting on objects lays down a template for subsequent thinking. This suggests that cognitive complexity is partially determined by the numbers and diversity of objects the child may use -- a hypothesis consistent with experimental studies of animal neurodevelopment. In a group of siblings, then, the sharing of objects -- or turn-taking -- should foster more aggregate cognitive development than a scheme of exclusive possession. Since artifacts left by early hominids suggest that they possessed sensorimotor and early preoperational intelligence, and used various foraging tools, it follows that a norm of object or tool sharing among siblings would have been more adaptive for them than a norm of exclusive possession.

Ontogeny of the Inclusive Fitness Maxim: Developmental Trends in Children's Preferences for Helping Friend of Kin
HARVEY J. GINSBURG & RACHEL HOCHMAN-WALSH, Southwest Texas State University

A cross cultural sample of 212 3 to 10-year-old children had a hypothetical danger situation presented to them which required a decision to help either a favorite friend or favorite related person. Children 3-7 years old from urban backgrounds in the U.S. and Israel and those raised on an Israeli kibbutz showed no preference for aiding kin over friend. Older children showed a strong preference for helping relatives and used a kinship principle to justify their decisions. The ubiquitous and cross cultural nature of these findings support a developmental-psychobiological perspective for the relation between altruism and kinship.

Evolutionary and Developmental Perspectives on Cooperation and Competition
PETER J. LAFRENIERE, University of Maine

The ability to balance cooperative and egoistic tendencies can be considered fundamental to successful adaptation for members of social species. Cooperation among unrelated individuals can arise when a goal can be attained by a cooperative pair, but is impossible to achieve by either partner working alone or when a cooperative pair stands to gain more by working together than a non cooperative pair. Natural selection will tend to favor conditional strategies that base the decision to cooperate on cues in the environment. Developmental research that emphasizes direct observation can begin to address the factors that influence cooperative behavior, including age, gender and other individual differences linked to the behavioral ecology of peer groups.

Essence and Boundaries: Ontogeny of Distributed Social Skill in Baboons
DEBORAH FORSTER, UC San Diego, EDWIN HUTCHINS, UC San Diego, SHIRLEY C. STRUM, UC San Diego and Institute of Primate Research, Nairobi, Kenya

Interpersonal cognitive processes and internal cognitive processes may be significantly related in humans. If so, the nature of this interaction raises fundamental questions about the evolution of cognition both in humans and in animals. The challenge is to find ways of identifying and studying interpersonal cognitive processes and their relationship to individual behavior. We develop a framework that tackles these issues by expanding the cognitive unit of analysis beyond the individual. In this way, social interactions can be seen as instances of distributed reasoning in social structure. It should be possible to apply this perspective to nonhuman animals. We propose to examine the ontogeny of social skill in baboons as a test of how interpersonal cognitive processes and individual behavior may be related. We discuss the implications of this approach for the evolution of cognition in animals and humans.

Discussant: PETER H. KAHN, Colby College

Social Cognition II

Chair: WILLIAM ARSENIO, Yeshiva University

Young Children's Conceptions of Freedom of Speech in General and in Conflict with Systems of Government
CHARLES C. HELWIG, University of Toronto

Elementary school children's (72 subjects in grades 1, 3 and 5) judgments about freedom of speech in general and in conflict with democratic and non-democratic systems of government was investigated. the majority of children at all ages endorsed freedom of speech, extended this right to other countries, and used a sophisticated array of rationales to support freedom of speech. They also judged it wrong for all systems of government to make laws restricting freedom of speech. Older children were more likely to judge violations of laws restricting speech acceptable. Implications of these findings for the early development and coordination of politico-moral understandings will be discussed.

Children's Moral and Ecological Reasoning about the Prince William Sound Oil Spill
PETER H. KAHN, Jr., & BATYA FRIEDMAN, Colby College

Sixty children across grades 2, 5 and 8 were interviewed on their moral and ecological understandings about the oil spill that occurred in 1989 in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Children were aware that the oil spill negatively impacted shoreline, marine life, fishermen, recreationists, and the Exxon corporation. In contrast to 2nd graders, the large majority of 5th and 8th graders judged specific harms to nature as a violation of a moral obligation. Homocentric (human-centered) reasoning was used more often than biocentric (nature-centered) reasoning. Findings are discussed in terms of moral-developmental theory, and understanding the ontogeny of the human relationship to nature.

Narrative Knowledge in Childhood and Adolescence
ANNE McKEOUGH, University of Calgary, MARGARET MARTENS, Red Deer Youth Assessment Centre

Two studies, examining story compositions and moral reasoning, document the structural transformation of narrative knowledge across childhood and adolescence, from a action-based scripted organization, to a focus on actors' intentions, and finally to a psychological interpretation of actions and intentions. We argue that the developmental progression is made possible by both maturationally-based increases in processing capacity and culturally-specific learning opportunities and that the parallel performance on the two tasks reflects the centrality of narrative knowledge to social domains.

Theoretical Analysis of Children's Illness Concepts
CARRIE L. SAETERMOE, California State University

Sophistication of illness concepts has been found to relate to feelings of control, use of cognitive strategies in coping, compliance with medical regimen, accuracy of knowledge, and lower levels of moralistic reasoning about illness in children and adolescents who experience a physical illness and in those who are healthy. Two guiding theoretical paradigms, Piagetian and Wernerian, have aided in the interpretation of the development of illness concepts. This paper provides an analysis and synthesis of the issues that direct current thinking about the development of illness concepts in the service of clarifying the direction of this important literature.

Discussant: DAVID MOSHMAN, University of Nebraska

Social Interaction

Chair: PRENTICE STARKEY, UC Berkeley

Social Status and Attractiveness in a Group of Moscow Junior Schoolchildren
MARINA BUTOVSKAYA, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Moscow, Russia ALEXANDER KOZINTSEV, Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Universitetskaya, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

An ethological study of 9 boys and 13 girls, aged 6-7, was carried out at a Moscow school over a six-month period. Frequencies and numbers of partners for directed attention, giving orders, demonstrations, friendly and hostile contacts, and support were subjected to principal component (PC) analysis. PC1, describing general social status, showed no sex differences. Girls had significantly higher scores on PC2, reflecting attractiveness for other group members, and especially on PC3, apparently measuring the ability to manipulate social partners. PC4, on which boys and girls did not differ, reflects the degree of social dependence.

Laughing and Smiling in a Group of Moscow Junior Schoolchildren
ALEXANDER KOZINTSEV, Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Universitetskaya, Saint-Petersburg, Russia. MARINA BUTOVSKAYA, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Moscow, Russia

Laughing and smiling behavior were studied at a Moscow school in a group of 9 boys and 13 girls aged 6-7. Frequencies of performed and received laughing and smiling and numbers of active and passive partners were recorded for each child. Also, joint laughter was examined. These characteristics were shown to be positively correlated with other behavioral parameters, including attention structure, giving orders, aggression and friendly acts. The results of cluster analysis suggest that with respect to joint laughing and smiling the group was separated in two clusters, one including mostly boys, another, mostly girls. Directed laughing, however, was less sex-dependent.

The Influence of Peer Collaboration on the Interpersonal Negotiation Strategies of Adolescents
GARY FIREMAN, GREGORY FIELDS, GLORIA BELL, Texas Tech University

The effect of collaboration learning among equal status male and female dyads for social reasoning was examined. A pretest-post-test design was used with 30 subjects. 15 male and 15 female seventh graders were divided into individual or same sex collaborative conditions. Results indicated differences between male and female collaborative dyads on a social reasoning task. In the collaborative condition, male subjects performed better than male subjects working alone. In contrast, female subjects in the collaborative condition performed less well than female subjects working alone. There were no differences between males and females working by themselves.

Exclusion in Triads: A paradigm to Study Communicative Skills in Very Young Children
JACQUELINE NADEL, CNRS, Poitiers

Momentary exclusion in adult-child-child triads was used as an experimental design to study early indices of intentional communication. Through the Impact of exclusion, the main concern of the current study was to evaluate 11 month-olds and 23 month-olds capacities to monitor one's contribution in interaction and to understand ones and others' social positions. Results show an early understanding of communicative roles which leads the same child to initiate different communicative behaviour according to her position in the triad (excluded of or included in an ongoing dyadic interaction).

Discussant: CYNTHIA LIGHTFOOT, SUNY, Plattsburgh

top of page

	© 1995-1998 The Jean Piaget Society Send comments to: webmaster@piaget.org Last Update: 21 March 1998

Send comments to: webmaster@piaget.org

Last Update: 21 March 1998