Linda Smith

" A radical departure from most of current cognitive development theory.... Nativists, structuralists, empiricists and social constructivists will disagree with different parts of this book. Yet this landmark volume is essential reading for all of them."--Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Mark H. Johnson," Nature" A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action presents a comprehensive and detailed theory of early human development based on the principles of dynamic systems theory. Beginning with their own research in motor, perceptual, and cognitive development, Thelen and Smith raise fundamental questions about prevailing assumptions in the field. They propose a new theory of the development of cognition and action, unifying recent advances in dynamic systems theory with current research in neuroscience and neural development. In particular, they show how by processes of exploration and selection, multimodal experiences form the bases for self-organizing perception-action categories. Thelen and Smith offer a radical alternative to current cognitive theory, both in their emphasis on dynamic representation and in their focus on processes of change. Among the first attempt to apply complexity theory to psychology, they suggest reinterpretations of several classic issues in early cognitive development. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses the nature of developmental processes in general terms, the second covers dynamic principles in process and mechanism, and the third looks at how a dynamic theory can be applied to enduring puzzles of development. Cognitive Psychology series

The overall goal of this target article is to demonstrate a mechanism for an embodied cognition. The particular vehicle is a much-studied, but still widely debated phenomenon seen in 7–12 month-old-infants. In Piaget's classic “A-not-B error,” infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at location “A” continue to reach to that location even after they watch the toy hidden in a nearby location “B.” Here, we question the traditional explanations of the error as an indicator of infants' concepts of objects or other static mental structures. Instead, we demonstrate that the A-not-B error and its previously puzzling contextual variations can be understood by the coupled dynamics of the ordinary processes of goal-directed actions: looking, planning, reaching, and remembering. We offer a formal dynamic theory and model based on cognitive embodiment that both simulates the known A-not-B effects and offers novel predictions …

Dynamic systems is a recent theoretical approach to the study of development. In its contemporary formulation, the theory grows directly from advances in understanding complex and nonlinear systems in physics and mathematics, but it also follows a long and rich tradition of systems thinking in biology and psychology. The term dynamic systems, in its most generic form, means simply systems of elements that change over time. The more technical use, dynamical systems, refers to a class of mathematical equations that describe time‐based systems with particular properties.

Development is about creating something more from something less, for example, a walking and talking toddler from a helpless infant. One current theoretical framework views the developmental process as a change within a complex dynamic system. Development is seen as the emergent product of many decentralized and local interactions that occur in real time. We examine how studying the multicausality of real-time processes could be the key to understanding change over developmental time. We specifically consider recent research and theory on perseverative reaching by infants as a case study that demonstrates this approach.

First word learning should be difficult because any pairing of a word and scene presents the learner with an infinite number of possible referents. Accordingly, theorists of children’s rapid word learning have sought constraints on word-referent mappings. These constraints are thought to work by enabling learners to resolve the ambiguity inherent in any labeled scene to determine the speaker’s intended referent at that moment. The present study shows that 12- and 14-month-old infants can resolve the uncertainty problem in another way, not by unambiguously deciding the referent in a single word-scene pairing, but by rapidly evaluating the statistical evidence across many individually ambiguous words and scenes.

Previous studies have shown that young children selectively attend to some object properties and ignore others when generalizing a newly learned object name. Moreover, the specific properties children attend to depend on the stimulus and task context. The present study tested an attentional account: that children's feature selection in name generalization is guided by non-strategic attentional processes that are minimally influenced by new conceptual information presented in the task. Four experiments presented 3-year-old children and adults with novel artifacts consisting of distinctive base objects with appended parts. In a Name condition, subjects were asked whether test objects had the same name as the exemplar. In a Similarity condition, subjects made similarity judgments for the same objects. Subjects in two experiments were shown a function for either the base object or the parts. Both adults' naming and …

By the age of 3, children easily learn to name new objects, extending new names for unfamiliar objects by similarity in shape. Two experiments tested the proposal that experience in learning object names tunes children's attention to the properties relevant for naming—in the present case, to the property of shape—and thus facilitates the learning of more object names. In Experiment 1, a 9-week longitudinal study, 17-month-old children who repeatedly played with and heard names for members of unfamiliar object categories well organized by shape formed the generalization that only objects with similar shapes have the same name. Trained children also showed a dramatic increase in acquisition of new object names outside of the laboratory during the course of the study. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and showed that they depended on children's learning both a coherent category structure and object …

The A-not-B error is one of the most robust and highly studied phenomena in developmental psychology. The traditional Piagetian interpretation is that the error reflects the immaturity of infants' understanding of objects as permanent entities. More recently, the error has been interpreted in terms of changes in representation, in memory, in spatial knowledge, and in inhibitory processes. Each account may be partially right but none offers a unified account of the many accumulated facts about this error. This article presents and tests a new unified explanation. The authors propose that the perseverative reach back to A is the product of the processes that take a hand to a location in visual space: the body-centered nature of the spatial code, memories for previous reaching activity, and the close coupling of looking and reaching. The results from 6 experiments support this explanation. The results are used to challenge …

There are an infinite number of possible word-to-word pairings in naturalistic learning environments. Previous proposals to solve this mapping problem have focused on linguistic, social, representational, and attentional constraints at a single moment. This article discusses a cross-situational learning strategy based on computing distributional statistics across words, across referents, and, most important, across the co-occurrences of words and referents at multiple moments. We briefly exposed adults to a set of trials that each contained multiple spoken words and multiple pictures of individual objects; no information about word-picture correspondences was given within a trial. Nonetheless, over trials, subjects learned the word-picture mappings through cross-trial statistical relations. Different learning conditions varied the degree of within-trial reference uncertainty, the number of trials, and the length of trials. Overall …

The embodiment hypothesis is the idea that intelligence emerges in the interaction of an agent with an environment and as a result of sensorimotor activity. We offer six lessons for developing embodied intelligent agents suggested by research in developmental psychology. We argue that starting as a baby grounded in a physical, social, and linguistic world is crucial to the development of the flexible and inventive intelligence that characterizes humankind.

Current research on children's concepts and categories reflects a growing consensus that nonperceptual knowledge is central to concepts and determines category membership, whereas perceptual knowledge is peripheral in concepts and at best a rough guide to category membership. In this article, we assess the theoretical and empirical bases for this view. We examine experiments that seem to support the idea that concepts are principally nonperceptual, and find that the evidence is not compelling. We then turn to research on children's lexical category formation, which highlights multidirectional interactions between perception, language, and other kinds of knowledge, in specific contexts. This evidence suggests that conceptual knowledge encompasses both perceptual and nonperceptual knowledge as equal and interacting partners. The evidence also suggests a view of concepts, not as mentally represented …

Connectionist and dynamical systems approaches explain human thought, language and behavior in terms of the emergent consequences of a large number of simple noncognitive processes. We view the entities that serve as the basis for structured probabilistic approaches as abstractions that are occasionally useful but often misleading: they have no real basis in the actual processes that give rise to linguistic and cognitive abilities or to the development of these abilities. Although structured probabilistic approaches can be useful in determining what would be optimal under certain assumptions, we propose that connectionist, dynamical systems, and related approaches, which focus on explaining the mechanisms that give rise to cognition, will be essential in achieving a full understanding of cognition and development.

We investigated the roles of shape and function in object naming. Two-, three-, and five-year-olds and adults heard novel or familiar objects named; some participants also were instructed about the objects' functions. Then they were asked to generalize the names to new objects that preserved shape or functional capability; some participants also judged the objects' potential for carrying out the designated function. Children generalized the name by object shape regardless of instruction, but adults did so only in the absence of instruction or for familiar objects. Knowledge of function independent of naming became increasingly stronger and diverse over age. The strong developmental changes in the role of function bear on mechanisms of object naming.

The ease with which young children learn object nouns suggests that they possess strategies to identify properties critical to lexical category membership. In previous work, young children used a same‐shape criterion to extend new count nouns. The present research tested the generality of this shape bias, 2‐ and 3‐year‐olds were asked either to extend a novel count noun to new instances, or to choose unnamed objects to go together. The objects varied in shape, size, and texture. For half of the subjects, the objects had eyes—a property strongly associated with certain material kinds. If young children know this association, they should attend to texture as well as shape in classifying objects with eyes. With named objects only, both 2‐ and 3‐year‐old children classified eyeless objects by shape and objects with eyes by both shape and texture. The results suggest that very young children possess considerable …

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