PSY 335 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Infor, Intersubjectivity, Deeper Understanding
16 Mar 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Concepts: general ideas that organize objects, events, qualities, or relations on the basis of some similarity. Younger children focus on common characteristics versus those older (aged 9) focus on the definition. Innate understanding of concepts plays a central role in development. On false-belief tasks, preschoolers with siblings outperform peers without thus psychological understanding arises from interactions with other people. False-belief problems are correlated with ability to reason about complex counterfactual statements. Biological understanding comes from personal observations and from info from parents/teachers/general culture. Infants" causal understanding arises from observations of innumerable events in environment. Children learn about numbers through same types of experience and learning mechanisms that help them acquire other concepts. Theory of mind module (tomm): hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human being. Shows that for typical children exposed to a typical environment, the tomm matures over the first 5 years. Certain areas of brain are consistently active in representing beliefs across different tasks.
