1Piaget• Child as scientist, knowledge is constructed by the child.• Constructs:•assimilation, accommodation, equilibration,• concepts (e.g. object permanence, conservation, etc)• Nature vs. Nurture?• Continuous vs. Discontinuous?• Child as active or passive?• What drives behavior?• What drives change?Piaget on A-not-B• Babies fail at this task because they do not have theconcept of object permanence.• For 8-10-month-olds, an object is acting and sensing. Itslocation, the search itself, is part of the object.• Babies older than 12 months, succeed at the task becausethey are able to form and abstract mental representationof the object.Information Processing Theories• Children as computational devices.• Knowledge accrues over time, Emphasis on processes.• Constructs:• Memory, Attention, Strategies, Goals• Representations, operations.• Nature or Nurture?• Continuous vs. Discontinuous?• Child as active or passive?• What drives behavior?• What drives change?Traditional Information Processing on A-not-B(Diamond, Marcovitch & Zelazo)• Babies fail at this task because they have limitations ofbasic cognitive processes: memory, attention, planning.• 8-10-month-olds, have trouble remembering a newlocation, or inhibiting another search has been successfulbefore.• Babies older than 12 months, succeed at the task becausethey have more computational resources.2Connectionist Networks• Information is processed in parallel by simple units thatwork under simple rules.• General principles -- associative learning, generalizationby similarity, patterns of connectivity -- drive change.Connectionist Networks on A-not-B(Munakata, Johnson)• The A-not-B error arises from a competition between‘latent’ memory traces for A and ‘active’ traces for B.• 8-10-month olds fail at the A-not-B task because the“latent” memories of A win over the “active” memory of B.• Babies older than 12 months, succeed at the task becausethey are better at actively maintaining memory traces.Connectionist Model of InformationProcessingDynamic Systems• Child as a system• Emphasis on low-level processes - memory, attention,motor activity -- acting in time.• Constructs: trajectories, attractors• No representations.3Dynamic Systems on A-not-B(Thelen, Smith, Spencer)• The A-not-B error comes from the fact that attending andreaching at time T influence attending and reaching at timeT+1.• It is not about conceptual understanding -- people canmake an A-not-B error at any
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