The role of language in transcending core knowledge.

What Babies Know (WBK) argues that core knowledge has a unique place in cognitive architecture, between fully perceptual and fully conceptual systems of representation. Here I argue that WBK's core knowledge is on the perception side of the perception/cognition divide. I discuss some implications of this conclusion for the roles language learning might play in transcending core knowledge.

Infants' representations of michottean triggering events.

The classic Michottean 'launching' event is consistent with a real-world Newtonian elastic collision. Previous research has shown that adult humans distinguish launching events that obey some of the physical constraints on Newtonian elastic collisions from events that do not do so early in visual processing, and that infants do so early in development (< 9 months of age). These include that in a launching event, the speed of the agent can be 3 times faster (or more) than that of the patient but the speed of the patient cannot be detectably greater than the speed of the agent. Experiment 1 shows that 7-8-month-old infants also distinguish canonical launching events from events in which the motion of the patient is rotated 90° from the trajectory of the motion of the agent (another outcome ruled out by the physics of elastic collisions). Violations of both the relative speed and the angle constraints create Michottean 'triggering' events, in which adults describe the motion of the patient as autonomous but not spontaneous, i.e., still initiated by contact with the causal agent. Experiments 2 and 3 begin to explore whether infants of this age construe Michottean triggering events as causal. We find that infants of this age are not sensitive to a reversal of the agent and patient in triggering events, thus failing to exhibit one of the signatures of representing an event as causal. We argue that there are likely several independent events schemas with causal content represented by young infants, and the literature on the origins of causal cognition in infancy would benefit from systematic investigations of event schemas other than launching events.

Do nonlinguistic creatures deploy mental symbols for logical connectives in reasoning?

Some nonlinguistic systems of representation display some of the six features of a language-of-thought (LoT) delineated by Quilty-Dunn et al. But they conjecture something stronger: That all six features cooccur homeostatically in nonlinguistic thought. Here I argue that there is no good evidence for nonlinguistic deductive reasoning involving the disjunctive syllogism. Animals and prelinguistic children probably do not make logical inferences.

Minimal representations of possibility at age 3.

Young children do not always consider alternative possibilities when planning. Suppose a prize is hidden in a single occluded container and another prize is hidden in an occluded pair. If given a chance to choose one container and receive its contents, choosing the singleton maximizes expected reward because each member of the pair might be empty. Yet, 3-y-olds choose a member of the pair almost half the time. Why don't they maximize expected reward? Three studies provide evidence that 3-y-olds do not deploy possibility concepts like MIGHT, which would let them represent that each container in the pair might and might not contain a prize. Rather, they build an overly specific model of the situation that correctly specifies that the singleton holds a prize while inappropriately specifying which member of the pair holds a prize and which is empty. So, when asked to choose a container, they see two equally good options. This predicts approximately 50% choice of the singleton, observed in studies 1 and 3. But when asked to throw away a container so that they can receive the remaining contents (study 2), they mostly throw away a member of the pair. The full pattern of data is expected if children construct overly specific models. We discuss whether 3-year-olds lack possibility concepts or whether performance demands prevent deployment of them in our tasks.

The importance of inference in relational reasoning: Relational matching as a case study.

Nonhuman animals and preschoolers struggle with Relational-Match-to-Sample (RMTS), a classic test of the capacity for second-order relational, analogical, and reasoning. These failures are often explained by limitations in representational or computational capacities. Drawing on recent evidence for robust spontaneous RMTS success (i.e., without error-feedback) in crows and parrots after minimal second-order training, we present five experiments with human adults consistent with the possibility that population differences sometimes instead derive from differences in inductive biases alone. Experiment 1 confirms human adults have the capacities and requisite representations to succeed spontaneously on RMTS. Experiments 2-5 utilize a modified RMTS task in which adults make relational matches only about half of the time. Experiment 3 tests whether eight trials of various MTS tasks, nonsecond-order training featured in the aforementioned comparative studies, can increase spontaneous second-order relational responding in human adults. Two of the MTS tasks (Number, Size MTS) do so, demonstrating that MTS training can, in fact, increase relational responding by changing inductive biases alone. The other MTS tasks (Identity, Color MTS) do not do so, evidence that the facilitating effect is not a result of matching involved in MTS per se. Experiments 4 and 5 test one hypothesized mechanism by which specifically Number/Size MTS tasks may have led to increased relational responding, that is, by inhibiting preexisting biases to match on shape and/or color, making relational matches relatively more likely. We close by discussing the importance of research into inductive biases to the project of understanding relational reasoning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The development of reasoning by exclusion in infancy.

How do humans develop the capacity to reason? In five studies, we examined infants' emerging ability to make exclusion inferences using negation, as in the disjunctive syllogism (P or Q; not P; therefore Q). Inspired by studies of non-human animals and older children, Experiments 1-3 used an exclusion task adapted from Call's (2004) 2-cup paradigm and Experiments 4-5 used an exclusion task adapted from the blicket detector paradigm (Sobel & Kirkham, 2006). In both tasks, we found failure to make exclusion inferences at 15 months, fragile success at 17 months, and robust success by 20 months of age. These data converge with some prior evidence that fails to find a capacity to represent negation in infants younger than 15 months of age and conflict with other evidence from different paradigms that suggests infants do have this capacity. We discuss three different resolutions of these conflicting data, and suggest lines of further work that might adjudicate among them.

Infants' Attributions of Insides and Animacy in Causal Interactions.

Past work has found that infants show more interest when an object that has at least two properties of animate beings, such as engaging in self-generated motion and having fur, is shown to be hollow than when an object with none or one of these properties is revealed to be hollow. When an object is grabbed by a hand and moved to a new place, by 7 months of age, infants explain the motion of the object as due to the hand, and thus do not interpret this object as capable of self-generated motion. This constant application of force is called an "entraining" event. Other work has found that 6-month-old infants are sensitive to the reversals of causal roles in "launching" events (billiard-ball-like collisions), but not entraining events. Here, we examine whether 10-month-old infants explain the motion of the patient in a launching event as being due to the contact with the launching agent. Experiment 1 replicates past work, showing that infants look longer when a self-propelled object with animate features (fur or feathers) is shown to be hollow, compared to a similar object undergoing spatiotemporally identical motion entrained by a human agent. Experiment 2 finds that infants look equally at the agent and patient, both covered by fur or feathers, of a launching event when each is revealed to be hollow. Experiment 3 shows that infants look longer when a fur-covered causal patient is shown to be hollow compared to a plain-box causal agent, indicating that 10-month-old infants do not explain the motion of the causal patient of a launching event as due to the agent, even though they do so for an entraining event. This dissociation suggests the existence of multiple independent causal representations in the first year of life.

You cannot find what you are not looking for: Population differences in relational reasoning are sometimes differences in inductive biases alone.

Relational reasoning is a cornerstone of human cognition. Extensive work, drawing on the Relational Match to Sample paradigm (RMTS), has established that humans, at least above the age of five, are much more proficient relational reasoners than younger children or non-human animals. While sometimes differences between populations derive from differences in capacity (the capacity to create representations in a certain format or of a certain complexity, information processing capacity), other times such differences derive from different learning histories alone. Here we distinguish between two types of learning history explanations on the example of four-year-olds' failure on Premack's (1983) RMTS task: (1) that children four-year-olds have not yet created representations of the relations same and different with the properties need to support success on RMTS and (2) that four-year-olds have different inductive biases than do adults. Experiment 1 established that four-year-olds are at chance on the RMTS task we deploy as a transfer task in Experiment 2. Experiments 2A-C each provide children with a mere 8 trials of training on of one three MTS tasks (Number, Size and Identity MTS, respectively), none of which involves making matches of same to same or different to different. The very brief training (eight trials) on two of these tasks (Number MTS, Size MTS) leads to spontaneous success on RMTS in four-year-olds. Identity MTS has no effect on subsequent performance on RMTS. Given the brevity and non-relational nature of the training the successes after Number and Size MTS training must have resulted from changing inductive biases alone. Furthermore, the same two training tasks increased relational responding by adults on a related task (Kroupin & Carey, in press), whereas Identity MTS training did not, suggesting that the mechanisms through which the training changed inductive biases are at least partially continuous between ages four and adulthood.

Parent-focused prevention of adolescent health risk behavior: Study protocol for a multisite cluster-randomized trial implemented in pediatric primary care.

Evidence-based parenting interventions play a crucial role in the sustained reduction of adolescent behavioral health concerns. Guiding Good Choices (GGC) is a 5-session universal anticipatory guidance curriculum for parents of early adolescents that has been shown to reduce substance use, depression symptoms, and delinquent behavior. Although prior research has demonstrated the effectiveness of evidence-based parenting interventions at achieving sustained reductions in adolescent behavioral health concerns, public health impact has been limited by low rates of uptake in community and agency settings. Pediatric primary care is an ideal setting for implementing and scaling parent-focused prevention programs as these settings have a broad reach, and prevention programs implemented within them have the potential to achieve population-level impact. The current investigation, Guiding Good Choices for Health (GGC4H), tests the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing GGC in 3 geographically and socioeconomically diverse large integrated healthcare systems. This pragmatic, cluster randomized clinical trial will compare GGC parenting intervention to usual pediatric primary care practice, and will include approximately 3750 adolescents; n = 1875 GGC intervention and n = 1875 usual care. The study team hypothesizes that adolescents whose parents are randomized into the GGC intervention arm will show reductions in substance use initiation, the study's primary outcomes, and other secondary (e.g., depression symptoms, substance use prevalence) and exploratory outcomes (e.g., health services utilization, anxiety symptoms). The investigative team anticipates that the implementation of GGC within pediatric primary care clinics will successfully fill an unmet need for effective preventive parenting interventions. Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.govNCT04040153.

The Formal Structure of Kind Representations.

Kind representations, concepts like table, triangle, dog, and planet, underlie generic language. Here, we investigate the formal structure of kind representations-the structure that distinguishes kind representations from other types of representations. The present studies confirm that participants distinguish generic-supporting properties of individuals (e.g., this watch is made of steel) and accidental properties (e.g., this watch is on the nightstand). Furthermore, work dating back to Aristotle establishes that only some generic-supporting properties bear a principled connection to the kind, that is, are true of an individual by virtue of its being a member of a specific kind (e.g., telling time for a watch). The present studies tested the hypothesis that principled connections are part of the formal structure of kind representations. Specifically, they tested whether they structure a newly learned kind representation. Experiment 1 found that introducing a property of a newly encountered novel kind in any one of four linguistic frames that provide evidence that a property has a principled connection to a kind (e.g., "It has fur because it is a blick") led participants to infer a different conceptual consequence of principled connections (i.e., "There is something wrong with this blick, which does not have fur") for which they had no direct evidence. Two introduction frames that provided no evidence for principled connections (e.g., "Almost all blicks have fur") did not generate the same consequence. Experiment 2 found that all of the targeted properties were generic licensing, irrespective of the introduction frame. That the distinction between properties that bear principled connections to their kinds, and merely generic-supporting properties structures novel kind representations, provides strong evidence that this distinction is part of the formal structure of kind representations.

Age and Species Comparisons of Visual Mental Manipulation Ability as Evidence for its Development and Evolution.

Intelligent behavior is shaped by the abilities to store and manipulate information in visual working memory. Although humans and various non-human animals demonstrate similar storage capacities, the evolution of manipulation ability remains relatively unspecified. To what extent are manipulation limits unique to humans versus shared across species? Here, we compare behavioral signatures of manipulation ability demonstrated by human adults and 6-to-8-year-old children with that of an animal separated from humans by over 300 million years of evolution: a Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). All groups of participants completed a variant of the "Shell Game", which required mentally updating the locations of varying set sizes of occluded objects that swapped places a number of times. The parrot not only demonstrated above-chance performance, but also outperformed children across all conditions. Indeed, the parrot's accuracy was comparable to (and slightly better than) human adults' over 12/14 set-size/number-of-swaps combinations, until four items were manipulated with 3-4 swaps, where performance decreased toward that of 6- to 8-year-olds. These results suggest that manipulation of visual working memory representations is an evolutionarily ancient ability. An important next step in this research program is establishing variability across species, and identifying the evolutionary origins (analogous or homologous) of manipulation mechanisms.

Specifying the domain-general resources that contribute to conceptual construction: Evidence from the child's acquisition of vitalist biology.

There are two dissociable processes that underlie knowledge acquisition: knowledge enrichment, which involves learning information that can be represented with one's current conceptual repertoire; and conceptual construction, which involves acquiring knowledge that can only be represented in terms of concepts one does not yet possess. Theory changes involving conceptual change require conceptual construction. The cognitive mechanisms underlying conceptual change are still poorly understood, though executive function capacities have been implicated. The present study concerns the domain-general resources drawn upon in one well-studied case of the construction of a new framework theory in early childhood: the framework theory of vitalist biology, the ontogenetically earliest theory in which the concepts life and death come to have biological content shared with adults. Eighty-three five- and six-year-old children were tested on a battery of tasks that probe central concepts of the vitalist theory, as well as on a battery of tests of domain-general capacities that may be implicated in development in this domain, including measures of knowledge enrichment, executive function, and fluid IQ. With variance in accumulated knowledge and in knowledge enrichment capacity controlled, two specific executive functions, shifting and inhibition, predicted children's progress in constructing the vitalist theory. In contrast, working memory and fluid IQ were not associated with the acquisition of vitalist biology. These results provide further evidence for the distinction between knowledge enrichment and conceptual construction and impose new constraints on accounts of the mechanisms underlying conceptual construction in this domain.

The Acquisition of Modal Concepts.

Sometimes we accept propositions, sometimes we reject them, and sometimes we take propositions to be worth considering but not yet established, as merely possible. The result is a complex representation with logical structure. Is the ability to mark propositions as merely possible part of our innate representational toolbox or does it await development, perhaps relying on language acquisition? Several lines of inquiry show that preverbal infants manage possibilities in complex ways, while others find that preschoolers manage possibilities poorly. Here, we discuss how this apparent conflict can be resolved by distinguishing modal representations of possibility, which mark possibility symbolically, from minimal representations of possibility, which do not encode any modal status and need not have a logical structure.

Ontogenetic Origins of Human Integer Representations.

Do children learn number words by associating them with perceptual magnitudes? Recent studies argue that approximate numerical magnitudes play a foundational role in the development of integer concepts. Against this, we argue that approximate number representations fail both empirically and in principle to provide the content required of integer concepts. Instead, we suggest that children's understanding of integer concepts proceeds in two phases. In the first phase, children learn small exact number word meanings by associating words with small sets. In the second phase, children learn the meanings of larger number words by mastering the logic of exact counting algorithms, which implement the successor function and Hume's principle (that one-to-one correspondence guarantees exact equality). In neither phase do approximate number representations play a foundational role.

Real-world size is automatically encoded in preschoolers' object representations.

When adults see a picture of an object, they automatically process how big the object typically is in the real world (Konkle & Oliva, 2012a). How much life experience is needed for this automatic size processing to emerge? Here, we ask whether preschoolers show this same signature of automatic size processing. We showed 3- and 4-year-olds displays with two pictures of objects and asked them to touch the picture that was smaller on the screen. Critically, the relative visual sizes of the objects could be either congruent with their relative real-world sizes (e.g., a small picture of a shoe next to a big picture of a car) or incongruent with their relative real-world sizes (e.g., a big picture of a shoe next to a small picture of a car). Across two experiments, we found that preschoolers were worse at making visual size judgments on incongruent trials, suggesting that real-world size was automatically activated and interfered with their performance. In addition, we found that both 4-year-olds and adults showed similar item-pair effects (i.e., showed larger Size-Stroop effects for a given pair of items, relative to other pairs). Furthermore, the magnitude of the item-pair Stroop effects in 4-year-olds did not depend on whether they could recognize the pictured objects, suggesting that the perceptual features of these objects were sufficient to trigger the processing of real-world size information. These results indicate that, by 3-4 years of age, children automatically extract real-world size information from depicted objects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The development of principled connections and kind representations.

Kind representations draw an important distinction between properties that are understood as existing in instances of a kind by virtue of their being the kind of thing they are and properties that are not understood in this manner. For example, the property of barking for the kind dog is understood as being had by dogs by virtue of the fact that they are dogs. These properties are said to have a principled connection to the kind. In contrast, the property of wearing a collar is not understood as existing in instances by virtue of their being dogs, despite the fact that a large percentage of dogs wear collars. Such properties are said to have a statistical connection to the kind. Two experiments tested two signatures of principled connections in 4-7 year olds and adults: (i) that principled connections license normative expectations (e.g., we judge there to be something wrong with a dog that does not bark), and (ii) that principled connections license formal explanations which explain the existence of a property by reference to the kind (e.g., that barks because it is a dog). Experiment 1 showed that both the children and adults have normative expectations for properties that have a principled connection to a kind, but not those that have a mere statistical connection to a kind. Experiment 2 showed that both children and adults are more likely to provide a formal explanation when explaining the existence of properties with a principled connection to a kind than properties with statistical connections to their kinds. Both experiments showed no effect of age (over ages 4, 7, and adulthood) on the extent to which participants differentiated principled and statistical connections. We discuss the implications of the results for theories of conceptual representation and for the structure of explanation.

Infants learn a rule predicated on the relation same but fail to simultaneously learn a rule predicated on the relation different.

In two experiments, we assessed whether infants are able to learn rules predicated on two abstract relations linked by negation: same and different (not same). In an anticipatory looking paradigm, the relation between successive colored geometrical shapes predicted the location where a puppet would appear next. In Experiment 1, 7-month-olds learned and generalized a rule predicated on the relation same, but not a rule predicated on the relation different. Similarly, in Experiment 2, 12-month-olds learned a rule predicated on the relation same-shape, but not a rule predicated on the relation different-shape. Comparing our data with that from previous experiments in the speech domain, we found no effect of age, modality or rule complexity. We conclude that, in the first year of life, infants already possess a representation of the abstract relation same, which serves as input to a rule. In contrast, we find no evidence that they represent the relation different.

The role of domain-general cognitive resources in children's construction of a vitalist theory of biology.

Some episodes of learning are easier than others. Preschoolers can learn certain facts, such as "my grandmother gave me this purse," only after one or two exposures (easy to learn; fast mapping), but they require several years to learn that plants are alive or that the sun is not alive (hard to learn). One difference between the two kinds of knowledge acquisition is that hard cases often require conceptual construction, such as the construction of the biological concept alive, whereas easy cases merely involve forming new beliefs formulated over concepts the child already has (belief revision, a form of knowledge enrichment). We asked whether different domain-general cognitive resources support these two types of knowledge acquisition (conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment that supports fast mapping) by testing 82 6-year-olds in a pre-training/training/post-training study. We measured children's improvement in an episode involving theory construction (the beginning steps of acquisition of the framework theory of vitalist biology, which requires conceptual change) and in an episode involving knowledge enrichment alone (acquisition of little known facts about animals, such as the location of crickets' ears and the color of octopus blood). In addition, we measured children's executive functions and receptive vocabulary to directly compare the resources drawn upon in the two episodes of learning. We replicated and extended previous findings highlighting the differences between conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment, and we found that Executive Functions predict improvement on the Vitalism battery but not on the Fun Facts battery and that Receptive Vocabulary predicts improvement the Fun Facts battery but not on the Vitalism battery. This double dissociation provides new evidence for the distinction between the two types of knowledge acquisition, and bears on the nature of the learning mechanisms involved in each.

Children's representation of abstract relations in relational/array match-to-sample tasks.

Five experiments compared preschool children's performance to that of adults and of non-human animals on match to sample tasks involving 2-item or 16-item arrays that varied according to their composition of same or different items (Array Match-to-Sample, AMTS). They establish that, like non-human animals in most studies, 3- and 4-year-olds fail 2-item AMTS (the classic relational match to sample task introduced into the literature by Premack, 1983), and that robust success is not observed until age 6. They also establish that 3-year-olds, like non-human animal species, succeed only when they are able to encode stimuli in terms of entropy, a property of an array (namely its internal variability), rather than relations among the individuals in the array (same vs. different), whereas adults solve both 2-item and 16-item AMTS on the basis of the relations same and different. As in the case of non-human animals, the acuity of 3- and 4-year-olds' representation of entropy is insufficient to solve the 2-item same-different AMTS task. At age 4, behavior begins to contrast with that of non-human species. On 16-item AMTS, a subgroup of 4-year-olds induce a categorical rule matching all-same arrays to all-same arrays, while matching other arrays (mixed arrays of same and different items) to all-different arrays. These children tend to justify their choices using the words "same" and "different." By age 4 a number of our participants succeed at 2-item AMTS, also justifying their choices by explicit verbal appeals using words for same and different. Taken together these results suggest that the recruitment of the relational representations corresponding to the meaning of these words contributes to the better performance over the preschool years at solving array match-to-sample tasks.