%0 Journal Article %J Child Development %D 2023 %T Infants and toddlers leverage their understanding of action goals to evaluate agents who help others %A Woo, Brandon M. %A Spelke, Elizabeth S. %X

Why do infants and toddlers prefer helpers? Four experiments (conducted from 2019–2022; n = 136, 66% White, 15% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic/Latino, 13% multiracial, majority USA) investigated whether infants and toddlers favor agents whose actions allow others to achieve their goals. In the key experiment, 8-month-old infants and 15-month-old toddlers viewed a protagonist who tried and failed to open a box that contained a toy while two other agents (helpers) observed; then the toys were exchanged and the helpers opened different boxes. Infants and toddlers differently evaluated the two helpers, consistent with their developing means-end understanding. Together, the present four experiments connect infants' and toddlers' evaluations of helping to their understanding of goal-directed behavior.

%B Child Development %8 02/2023 %G eng %U https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13895 %! Child Development %R 10.1111/cdev.13895 %0 Journal Article %J Open Mind %D 2022 %T Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in Other Agents’ Action PlansAbstract %A Liu, Shari %A Pepe, Bill %A Ganesh Kumar, Manasa %A Ullman, Tomer D. %A Tenenbaum, Joshua B. %A Spelke, Elizabeth S. %K action understanding %K agency %K cognitive development %K infancy %K open data %K open materials %K pre-registered %X

Do infants appreciate that other people’s actions may fail, and that these failures endow risky actions with varying degrees of negative utility (i.e., danger)? Three experiments, including a pre-registered replication, addressed this question by presenting 12- to 15-month-old infants (N = 104, 52 female, majority White) with an animated agent who jumped over trenches of varying depth towards its goals. Infants expected the agent to minimize the danger of its actions, and they learned which goal the agent preferred by observing how much danger it risked to reach each goal, even though the agent’s actions were physically identical and never failed. When we tested younger, 10-month-old infants (N = 102, 52 female, majority White) in a fourth experiment, they did not succeed consistently on the same tasks. These findings provide evidence that one-year-old infants use the height that other agents could fall from in order to explain and predict those agents’ actions.

%B Open Mind %V 6 %P 211 - 231 %8 10/2022 %G eng %U https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00063/113342/Dangerous-Ground-One-Year-Old-Infants-are %R 10.1162/opmi_a_00063 %0 Journal Article %J Science %D 2022 %T Early concepts of intimacy: Young humans use saliva sharing to infer close relationships %A Thomas, Ashley J. %A Woo, Brandon %A Nettle, Daniel %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Rebecca Saxe %X

Across human societies, people form “thick” relationships characterized by strong attachments, obligations, and mutual responsiveness. People in thick relationships share food utensils, kiss, or engage in other distinctive interactions that involve sharing saliva. We found that children, toddlers, and infants infer that dyads who share saliva (as opposed to other positive social interactions) have a distinct relationship. Children expect saliva sharing to happen in nuclear families. Toddlers and infants expect that people who share saliva will respond to one another in distress. Parents confirm that saliva sharing is a valid cue of relationship thickness in their children’s social environments. The ability to use distinctive interactions to infer categories of relationships thus emerges early in life, without explicit teaching; this enables young humans to rapidly identify close relationships, both within and beyond families.

%B Science %V 375 %P 311 - 315 %8 01/2022 %G eng %U https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh1054 %N 6578 %! Science %R 10.1126/science.abh1054 %0 Journal Article %J Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences %D 2022 %T Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parent with unknown others %A Thomas, Ashley J. %A Saxe, Rebecca %A Spelke, Elizabeth S. %X

Significance

Despite decades of research on the development of social knowledge, few experiments have tested how infants learn about new individuals from the behavior of their caregivers. Here, we show that infants learn who is a potential social partner by observing their parents’ interactions with previously unknown individuals.

Abstract

Infants are born into networks of individuals who are socially connected. How do infants begin learning which individuals are their own potential social partners? Using digitally edited videos, we showed 12-mo-old infants’ social interactions between unknown individuals and their own parents. In studies 1 to 4, after their parent showed affiliation toward one puppet, infants expected that puppet to engage with them. In study 5, infants made the reverse inference; after a puppet engaged with them, the infants expected that puppet to respond to their parent. In each study, infants’ inferences were specific to social interactions that involved their own parent as opposed to another infant’s parent. Thus, infants combine observation of social interactions with knowledge of their preexisting relationship with their parent to discover which newly encountered individuals are potential social partners for themselves and their families.

%B Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences %V 119 %8 05/2022 %G eng %U https://pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2121390119 %N 32 %! Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. %R 10.1073/pnas.2121390119 %0 Journal Article %J Developmental Science %D 2022 %T Toddlers’ social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs %A Woo, Brandon M. %A Spelke, Elizabeth S. %X

Mature social evaluations privilege agents’ intentions over the outcomes of their actions, but young children often privilege outcomes over intentions in verbal tasks probing their social evaluations. In three experiments (N = 118), we probed the development of intention-based social evaluation and mental state reasoning using nonverbal methods with 15-month-old toddlers. Toddlers viewed scenarios depicting a protagonist who sought to obtain one of two toys, each inside a different box, as two other agents observed. Then, the boxes’ contents were switched in the absence of the protagonist and either in the presence or the absence of the other agents. When the protagonist returned, one agent opened the box containing the protagonist's desired toy (a positive outcome), and the other opened the other box (a neutral outcome). When both agents had observed the toys move to their current locations, the toddlers preferred the agent who opened the box containing the desired toy. In contrast, when the agents had not seen the toys move and therefore should have expected the desired toy's location to be unchanged, the toddlers preferred the agent who opened the box that no longer contained the desired toy. Thus, the toddlers preferred the agent who intended to make the protagonist's desired toy accessible, even when its action, guided by a false belief concerning that toy's location, did not produce a positive outcome. Well before children connect beliefs to social behavior in verbal tasks, toddlers engage in intention-based evaluations of social agents with false beliefs.

%B Developmental Science %V 26 %8 08/2022 %G eng %U https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14677687/26/2 %N 2 %! Developmental Science %R 10.1111/desc.v26.210.1111/desc.13314 %0 Journal Article %J PLOS ONE %D 2022 %T Using machine learning to understand age and gender classification based on infant temperament %A Gartstein, Maria A. %A Seamon, D. Erich %A Mattera, Jennifer A. %A Bosquet Enlow, Michelle %A Wright, Rosalind J. %A Perez-Edgar, Koraly %A Buss, Kristin A. %A LoBue, Vanessa %A Bell, Martha Ann %A Goodman, Sherryl H. %A Spieker, Susan %A Bridgett, David J. %A Salisbury, Amy L. %A Gunnar, Megan R. %A Mliner, Shanna B. %A Muzik, Maria %A Stifter, Cynthia A. %A Planalp, Elizabeth M. %A Mehr, Samuel A. %A Spelke, Elizabeth S. %A Lukowski, Angela F. %A Groh, Ashley M. %A Lickenbrock, Diane M. %A Santelli, Rebecca %A Du Rocher Schudlich, Tina %A Anzman-Frasca, Stephanie %A Thrasher, Catherine %A Diaz, Anjolii %A Dayton, Carolyn %A Moding, Kameron J. %A Jordan, Evan M. %E Siuly, Siuly %X

Age and gender differences are prominent in the temperament literature, with the former particularly salient in infancy and the latter noted as early as the first year of life. This study represents a meta-analysis utilizing Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R) data collected across multiple laboratories (N = 4438) to overcome limitations of smaller samples in elucidating links among temperament, age, and gender in early childhood. Algorithmic modeling techniques were leveraged to discern the extent to which the 14 IBQ-R subscale scores accurately classified participating children as boys (n = 2,298) and girls (n = 2,093), and into three age groups: youngest (< 24 weeks; n = 1,102), mid-range (24 to 48 weeks; n = 2,557), and oldest (> 48 weeks; n = 779). Additionally, simultaneous classification into age and gender categories was performed, providing an opportunity to consider the extent to which gender differences in temperament are informed by infant age. Results indicated that overall age group classification was more accurate than child gender models, suggesting that age-related changes are more salient than gender differences in early childhood with respect to temperament attributes. However, gender-based classification was superior in the oldest age group, suggesting temperament differences between boys and girls are accentuated with development. Fear emerged as the subscale contributing to accurate classifications most notably overall. This study leads infancy research and meta-analytic investigations more broadly in a new direction as a methodological demonstration, and also provides most optimal comparative data for the IBQ-R based on the largest and most representative dataset to date.

%B PLOS ONE %V 17 %P e0266026 %8 04/2022 %G eng %U https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266026 %N 4 %! PLoS ONE %R 10.1371/journal.pone.0266026 %0 Journal Article %J Cognitive Psychology %D 2022 %T Visual foundations of Euclidean geometry %A Izard, Véronique %A Pica, Pierre %A Spelke, Elizabeth S. %X

Geometry defines entities that can be physically realized in space, and our knowledge of abstract geometry may therefore stem from our representations of the physical world. Here, we focus on Euclidean geometry, the geometry historically regarded as “natural”. We examine whether humans possess representations describing visual forms in the same way as Euclidean geometry – i.e., in terms of their shape and size. One hundred and twelve participants from the U.S. (age 3–34 years), and 25 participants from the Amazon (age 5–67 years) were asked to locate geometric deviants in panels of 6 forms of variable orientation. Participants of all ages and from both cultures detected deviant forms defined in terms of shape or size, while only U.S. adults drew distinctions between mirror images (i.e. forms differing in “sense”). Moreover, irrelevant variations of sense did not disrupt the detection of a shape or size deviant, while irrelevant variations of shape or size did. At all ages and in both cultures, participants thus retained the same properties as Euclidean geometry in their analysis of visual forms, even in the absence of formal instruction in geometry. These findings show that representations of planar visual forms provide core intuitions on which humans’ knowledge in Euclidean geometry could possibly be grounded.

%B Cognitive Psychology %V 136 %P 101494 %8 08/2022 %G eng %U https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010028522000317 %! Cognitive Psychology %R 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101494 %0 Book %D 2022 %T What Babies KnowAbstractCore KnowledgeAbstract %A Spelke, Elizabeth S. %X

Research on infants’ knowledge of objects, places, and number provides evidence for core cognitive systems that capture abstract, interconnected concepts and are early-emerging, present throughout life, innate, and supportive of learning. These systems also are ancient (they are shared by a wide range of other animals), sharply limited, unconscious, automatically activated, and dependent on our limited attentional resources. Here the author suggests that these properties collectively form a natural kind: a cognitive system with some of these properties will likely have all of them. Notably, a cognitive system shared by diverse, distantly related animals will gain a primordial blessing of abstraction: For example, the core place system will represent only the abstract geometric properties that apply to all the environments of the navigating animals that possess it, including terrestrial rats, flying birds, and aquatic fish. In the coming chapters, the author uses these arguments to propose three more systems of core knowledge.

%7 1 %I Oxford University PressNew York %P 190 - C5.T1 %8 08/2022 %@ 01906182489780190618247 %G eng %U https://academic.oup.com/book/43912 %R 10.1093/oso/9780190618247.001.000110.1093/oso/9780190618247.003.0005 %0 Journal Article %J Cognitive Science %D 2022 %T What Could Go Wrong: Adults and Children Calibrate Predictions and Explanations of Others' Actions Based on Relative Reward and Danger %A Gjata, Nensi N. %A Ullman, Tomer D. %A Spelke, Elizabeth S. %A Liu, Shari %X

When human adults make decisions (e.g., wearing a seat belt), we often consider the negative consequences that would ensue if our actions were to fail, even if we have never experienced such a failure. Do the same considerations guide our understanding of other people's decisions? In this paper, we investigated whether adults, who have many years of experience making such decisions, and 6- and 7-year-old children, who have less experience and are demonstrably worse at judging the consequences of their own actions, conceive others' actions as motivated both by reward (how good reaching one's intended goal would be), and by what we call “danger” (how badly one's action could end). In two pre-registered experiments, we tested whether adults and 6- and 7-year-old children tailor their predictions and explanations of an agent's action choices to the specific degree of danger and reward entailed by each action. Across four different tasks, we found that children and adults expected others to negatively appraise dangerous situations and minimize the danger of their actions. Children's and adults' judgments varied systematically in accord with both the degree of danger the agent faced and the value the agent placed on the goal state it aimed to achieve. However, children did not calibrate their inferences about how much an agent valued the goal state of a successful action in accord with the degree of danger the action entailed, and adults calibrated these inferences more weakly than inferences concerning the agent's future action choices. These results suggest that from childhood, people use a degree of danger and reward to make quantitative, fine-grained explanations and predictions about other people's behavior, consistent with computational models on theory of mind that contain continuous representations of other agents' action plans.

%B Cognitive Science %V 46 %8 06/2022 %G eng %U https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15516709/46/7 %N 7 %! Cognitive Science %R 10.1111/cogs.v46.710.1111/cogs.13163 %0 Generic %D 2021 %T AGENT: A Benchmark for Core Psychological Reasoning %A Tianmin Shu %A Abhishek Bhandwaldar %A Chuang Gan %A Kevin A Smith %A Shari Liu %A Dan Gutfreund %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Tomer D. Ullman %B Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning %8 07/2021 %0 Journal Article %J PsyArXiv Preprints %D 2020 %T The ability to predict actions of others from distributed cues is still developing in children %A Daniel Kim %A Emalie McMahon %A Samuel Mehr %A Ken Nakayama %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam %K Action prediction %K action understanding %K Biological motion %K development %K Social interaction %X

Adults use distributed cues in the bodies of others to predict and counter their actions. To investigate the development of this ability, adults and 6- to 8-year-old children played a competitive game with a confederate who reached toward one of two targets. Child and adult participants, who sat across from the confederate, attempted to beat the confederate to the target by touching it before the confederate did. Adults used cues distributed through the head, shoulders, and body to predict the reaching actions. Children, in contrast, used cues in the arms and torso but not in the head, face or shoulders to predict the actions. These results provide evidence for a qualitative change in the ability to respond rapidly to predictive cues to others’ actions develops slowly over childhood. Despite children’s sensitivity to eye gaze even in infancy, cues from the head and body do not influence their action predictions as late as 8 years of age.

%B PsyArXiv Preprints %8 01/2020 %G eng %R 10.31234/osf.io/pu3tf %0 Conference Paper %B Proceedings of the 42th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - Developing a Mind: Learning in Humans, Animals, and Machines, CogSci 2020, virtual, July 29 - August 1, 2020 %D 2020 %T The fine structure of surprise in intuitive physics: when, why, and how much? %A Kevin A Smith %A Lingjie Mei %A Shunyu Yao %A Jiajun Wu %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Tomer D. Ullman %E Stephanie Denison %E Michael Mack %E Yang Xu %E Blair C. Armstrong %B Proceedings of the 42th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - Developing a Mind: Learning in Humans, Animals, and Machines, CogSci 2020, virtual, July 29 - August 1, 2020 %G eng %U https://cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2020/papers/0761/index.html %0 Conference Paper %B Budapest Conference on Cognitive Development %D 2020 %T Infants represent 'like-kin' affiliation %A Ashley J. Thomas %A Rebecca Saxe %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Budapest Conference on Cognitive Development %C Budapest, Hungary %8 01/2020 %G eng %0 Journal Article %J Infancy %D 2020 %T Infants’ sensitivity to shape changes in 2D visual forms %A Dillon, Moira R. %A Izard, Véronique %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Infancy %V 25 %P 618 - 639 %8 09/2020 %G eng %U https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15327078/25/5 %N 5 %! Infancy %R 10.1111/infa.12343 %0 Journal Article %J Journal of Experimental Child Psychology %D 2020 %T Learning from multiple informants: Children’s response to epistemic bases for consensus judgments %A Kim, Sunae %A Elizabeth S Spelke %K Consensus %K Epistemic vigilance %K Selective learning %K social cognition %K Testimony %K Young children %B Journal of Experimental Child Psychology %V 192 %P 104759 %8 04/2020 %G eng %U https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0022096519303108 %! Journal of Experimental Child Psychology %R 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104759 %0 Journal Article %J Trends in Cognitive Sciences %D 2020 %T Online Developmental Science to Foster Innovation, Access, and Impact %A Sheskin, Mark %A Scott, Kimberly %A Mills, Candice M. %A Bergelson, Elika %A Bonawitz, Elizabeth %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Fei-Fei, Li %A Keil, Frank C. %A Gweon, Hyowon %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Julian Jara-Ettinger %A Adolph, Karen E. %A Rhodes, Marjorie %A Frank, Michael C. %A Mehr, Samuel A. %A Laura Schulz %B Trends in Cognitive Sciences %V 24 %P 675 - 678 %8 09/2020 %G eng %U https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1364661320301455 %N 9 %! Trends in Cognitive Sciences %R 10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.004 %0 Conference Proceedings %B Cognitive Science Society %D 2019 %T Draping an Elephant: Uncovering Children's Reasoning About Cloth-Covered Objects %A Tomer D Ullman %A Eliza Kosoy %A Ilker Yildirim %A Amir Arsalan Soltani %A Max Siegel %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Elizabeth S Spelke %K analysis-by-synthesis %K cloth %K cognitive development %K imagination %K intuitive physics %K object recognition %K occlusion %K perception %K vision %X

Humans have an intuitive understanding of physics. They can predict how a physical scene will unfold, and reason about how it came to be. Adults may rely on such a physical representation for visual reasoning and recognition, going beyond visual features and capturing objects in terms of their physical properties. Recently, the use of draped objects in recognition was used to examine adult object representations in the absence of many common visual features. In this paper we examine young children’s reasoning about draped objects in order to examine the develop of physical object representation. In addition, we argue that a better understanding of the development of the concept of cloth as a physical entity is worthwhile in and of itself, as it may form a basic ontological category in intuitive physical reasoning akin to liquids and solids. We use two experiments to investigate young children’s (ages 3–5) reasoning about cloth-covered objects, and find that they perform significantly above chance (though far from perfectly) indicating a representation of physical objects that can interact dynamically with the world. Children’s success and failure pattern is similar across the two experiments, and we compare it to adult behavior. We find a small effect, which suggests the specific features that make reasoning about certain objects more difficult may carry into adulthood.

%B Cognitive Science Society %C Montreal, Canada %8 07/2019 %G eng %U https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2019/papers/0506/index.html %0 Conference Paper %B Cognitive Science Society %D 2019 %T Hard choices: Children’s understanding of the cost of action selection. %A Shari Liu %A Fiery A Cushman %A Samuel J Gershman %A Kool, Wouter %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Cognitive Science Society %G eng %0 Journal Article %J Journal of Experimental Child Psychology %D 2019 %T Language, gesture, and judgment: Children’s paths to abstract geometry %A Calero, Cecilia I. %A Shalom, Diego E. %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Sigman, Mariano %K Explicit knowledge; Geometrical reasoning; Gestures; Implicit knowledge; Language; Thought %X

As infants, children are sensitive to geometry when recognizing objects or navigating through rooms; however, explicit knowledge of geometry develops slowly and may be unstable even in adults. How can geometric concepts be both so accessible and so elusive? To examine how implicit and explicit geometric concepts develop, the current study assessed, in 132 children (3-8 years old) while they played a simple geometric judgment task, three distinctive channels: children's choices during the game as well as the language and gestures they used to justify and accompany their choices. Results showed that, for certain geometric properties, children chose the correct card even if they could not express with words (or gestures) why they had made this choice. Furthermore, other geometric concepts were expressed and supported by gestures prior to their articulation in either choices or speech. These findings reveal that gestures and behavioral choices may reflect implicit knowledge and serve as a foundation for the development of geometric reasoning. Altogether, our results suggest that language alone might not be enough for expressing and organizing geometric concepts and that children pursue multiple paths to overcome its limitations, a finding with potential implications for primary education in mathematics.

%B Journal of Experimental Child Psychology %V 177 %P 70 - 85 %8 01/2019 %G eng %U https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0022096517306252 %! Journal of Experimental Child Psychology %R 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.07.015 %0 Conference Proceedings %B 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019) %D 2019 %T Modeling Expectation Violation in Intuitive Physics with Coarse Probabilistic Object Representations %A Kevin A Smith %A Lingjie Mei %A Shunyu Yao %A Jiajun Wu %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Tomer D. Ullman %X

From infancy, humans have expectations about how objects will move and interact. Even young children expect objects not to move through one another, teleport, or disappear. They are surprised by mismatches between physical expectations and perceptual observations, even in unfamiliar scenes with completely novel objects. A model that exhibits human-like understanding of physics should be similarly surprised, and adjust its beliefs accordingly. We propose ADEPT, a model that uses a coarse (approximate geometry) object-centric representation for dynamic 3D scene understanding. Inference integrates deep recognition networks, extended probabilistic physical simulation, and particle filtering for forming predictions and expectations across occlusion. We also present a new test set for measuring violations of physical expectations, using a range of scenarios derived from de- velopmental psychology. We systematically compare ADEPT, baseline models, and human expectations on this test set. ADEPT outperforms standard network architectures in discriminating physically implausible scenes, and often performs this discrimination at the same level as people.

%B 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019) %C Vancouver, Canada %8 11/2019 %G eng %U http: //physadept.csail.mit.edu/ %0 Journal Article %J PNAS %D 2019 %T Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants %A Shari Liu %A Neon B. Brooks %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

We investigated the origins and interrelations of causal knowledge and knowledge of agency in 3-month-old infants, who cannot yet effect changes in the world by reaching for, grasping, and picking up objects. Across 5 experiments, n = 152 prereaching infants viewed object-directed reaches that varied in efficiency (following the shortest physically possible path vs. a longer path), goal (lifting an object vs. causing a change in its state), and causal structure (action on contact vs. action at a distance and after a delay). Prereaching infants showed no strong looking preference between a person’s efficient and inefficient reaches when the person grasped and displaced an object. When the person reached for and caused a change in the state of the object on contact, however, infants looked longer when this action was inefficient than when it was efficient. Three-month-old infants also showed a key signature of adults’ and older infants’ causal inferences: This looking preference was abolished if a short spatial and temporal gap separated the action from its effect. The basic intuition that people are causal agents, who navigate around physical constraints to change the state of the world, may be one important foundation for infants’ ability to plan their own actions and learn from the acts of others.

%B PNAS %8 08/2019 %G eng %U https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/08/19/1904410116/tab-article-info %R https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1904410116 %0 Generic %D 2019 %T Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants. %A Shari Liu %A Neon B. Brooks %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Cognitive Development Society %0 Journal Article %J PLOS ONE %D 2018 %T At 4.5 but not 5.5 years, children favor kin when the stakes are moderately high %A A C Spokes %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B PLOS ONE %V 13 %8 08/2018 %G eng %U http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202507 %N 8 %& e0202507 %R 10.1371/journal.pone.0202507 %0 Journal Article %J Developmental Psychology %D 2018 %T From Map Reading to Geometric Intuitions %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %K euclidean geometry %K mathematical cognition %K spatial cognition %K spatial symbols %X

The origins and development of our geometric intuitions have been debated for millennia. The present study links children’s developing intuitions about the properties of planar triangles to their developing abilities to read purely geometric maps. Six-year-old children are limited when navigating by maps that depict only the sides of a triangle in an environment composed of only the triangle’s corners and vice versa. Six-year-old children also incorrectly judge how the angle size of the third corner of a triangle varies with changes to the other two corners. These limitations in map reading and in judgments about triangles are attenuated, respectively, by 10 and 12 years of age. Moreover, as children get older, their map reading predicts their geometric judgments on the triangle task. Map reading thus undergoes developmental changes that parallel an emerging capacity to reason explicitly about the distance and angle relations essential to euclidean geometry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

 

Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000509.supp
%B Developmental Psychology %8 03/2018 %G eng %U http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-12810-001 %) Advance online publication. %R http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000509 %0 Journal Article %J Scientific Reports %D 2018 %T The statistical shape of geometric reasoning %A Hart, Yuval %A Moira R Dillon %A Andrew Marantan %A Cardenas, Anna L. %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Mahadevan, L. %X

Geometric reasoning has an inherent dissonance: its abstract axioms and propositions refer to perfect, idealized entities, whereas its use in the physical world relies on dynamic perception of objects. How do abstract Euclidean concepts, dynamics, and statistics come together to support our intuitive geometric reasoning? Here, we address this question using a simple geometric task – planar triangle completion. An analysis of the distribution of participants’ errors in localizing a fragmented triangle’s missing corner reveals scale-dependent deviations from a deterministic Euclidean representation of planar triangles. By considering the statistical physics of the process characterized via a correlated random walk with a natural length scale, we explain these results and further predict participants’ estimates of the missing angle, measured in a second task. Our model also predicts the results of a categorical reasoning task about changes in the triangle size and shape even when such completion strategies need not be invoked. Taken together, our findings suggest a critical role for noisy physical processes in our reasoning about elementary Euclidean geometry.

%B Scientific Reports %V 8 %8 08/2018 %G eng %U http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30314-y %N 1 %! Sci Rep %R 10.1038/s41598-018-30314-y %0 Journal Article %J Open Mind %D 2018 %T Third-Party Preferences for Imitators in Preverbal Infants %A Lindsey J Powell %A Elizabeth S Spelke %K imitation %K infancy %K social cognition %X

Participants in social interactions often imitate one another, thereby enhancing their affiliation. Here we probe the nature and early development of imitation-based affiliation through studies of infants’ preferences for animated characters who imitate, or are imitated by, other characters. Four experiments provide evidence that preverbal infants preferentially attend to and approach individuals who imitate others. This preferential engagement is elicited by the elements of mimicry in simple acts of helping. It does not, however, extend to the targets of imitation in these interactions. This set of findings suggests infants’ imitation-based preferences are not well explained by homophily, prestige, or familiarity. We propose instead that infants perceive imitation as an indicator of valuable attributes in a potential social partner, including the capacity and motivation for social attention and coordinated action.

%B Open Mind %V 2 %P 61 - 71 %8 12/2018 %G eng %U https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/opmi_a_00018 %N 2 %! Open Mind %R 10.1162/opmi_a_00018 %0 Journal Article %J Cognition %D 2017 %T The cradle of social knowledge: Infants' reasoning about caregiving and affiliation %A A C Spokes %A Elizabeth S Spelke %K caregiving %K social cognition %K social development %X

Considerable research has examined infants’ understanding and evaluations of social agents, but two questions remain unanswered: First, do infants organize observed social relations into larger structures, inferring the relationship between two social beings based on their relations to a third party? Second, how do infants reason about a type of social relation prominent in all societies: the caregiving relation between parents and their babies? In a series of experiments using animated events, we ask whether 15- to 18-month-old infants infer that two babies who were comforted by the same adult, or two adults who comforted the same baby, will affiliate with one another. We find that infants make both of these inferences, but they make no comparable inferences when presented with the same visible events with voices that specify a peer context, in which one adult responds to another laughing adult. Thus, infants are sensitive to at least one aspect of caregiving and organize relations between infants and adults into larger social structures.

%B Cognition %V 159 %P 102-116 %8 02/2017 %G eng %R 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.008 %0 Conference Proceedings %B SRCD %D 2017 %T Critical Cues in Early Physical Reasoning %A Tomer Ullman %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B SRCD %C Austin, TX %G eng %0 Generic %D 2017 %T Five-month-old infants attend to responsive caregivers %A A C Spokes %A Tara Venkatesan %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Toddlers are sensitive to comforting interactions in animated events with geometric forms of different sizes that first move together, then separate, prompting the smaller form to emit a baby's cry (Johnson et al., 2007), and they expect adults who comfort the same crying baby to engage with one another (Spokes & Spelke, 2017), but an earlier sensitivity to comforting interactions is unknown. Two OSF- preregistered experiments (N=32) asked if 5-month-old infants prefer an adult who comforts a crying baby over one who does not. In Experiment 1, infants viewed alternating events in which a baby cried, and two adults responded by approaching or fleeing the baby, moving the same distances in different directions. When the adults then appeared together without the baby for one 20-sec visual preference trial, infants looked longer to the responsive adult, M = 0.608, SD = 0.206, t(15) = 2.167, p = 0.047, Figure 1. Experiment 2 replaced the crying baby with a car emitting a siren noise, comparable in salience to a baby's cry. Infants looked as long at approach and avoid events as in Exp. 1 but showed no test preference for the adult who approached the car, M = 0.486, SD = 0.212, t(15) = 0.264, p = 0.795, Figure 1. Infants' looking patterns in Exp. 1 thus cannot be explained by a general preference for an approaching over avoiding adult and suggest that infants attend to more responsive caregivers before they can approach or use language to communicate with their own social partners.

%B Cognitive Development Society (CDS) %C Portland, OR %U https://cogdevsoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CDS2017AbstractBook.pdf %0 Conference Proceedings %B Cognitive Development Society (CDS) %D 2017 %T Four-year-old children favor kin when the stakes are higher %A A C Spokes %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Only in cases when the stakes are high--donating a kidney or risking injury to rescue someone in peril-- do adults report more willingness to help siblings over close friends (Stewart-Williams, 2007). When people are dividing plentiful, low-value resources, children expect them to share equally with friend and siblings (Olson & Spelke, 2008). However, will children show a kinship preference when the stakes are higher? We first tested young children's relative favoring of kin versus friends and strangers in distributing limited resources--one item instead of many (Spokes & Spelke, 2016). We found that 3- to 5- year-old children (n=252) shared more with kin and friends than with strangers but did not favor kin over friend, either when reasoning about fictional characters (Experiments 1, 3) or about their own friends and family (Experiment 2). This pattern of results could have occurred for two reasons: first, young children do not yet have the kinship index mechanisms that guide adults' recent altruistic favors and reported likelihood of donating an organ to siblings (Lieberman, Tooby & Cosmides, 2007). Second, the hypothetical costs and rewards used may not be relevant or valuable to children. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we asked whether children would show a preference for kin if the cost was more relevant to them--their own time and effort. In the present experiment, we asked if children would work harder for kin over non-kin when playing a challenging geometry game (Dillon, Huang, & Spelke, 2013). Each round, they could earn stickers for a different recipient: themselves, a parent, sibling, friend, or an unfamiliar child. Children could end the round whenever they wanted. We measured the number of trials played, trials answered correctly, and duration of play. Data for the number of trials and duration played were log-normally distributed, so we log transformed these variables prior to analyses (Csibra, Hernik, Mascaro, Tatone, & Lengyel, 2016). Across these measures, one-way ANOVAs revealed that four-year-olds (n=24) played more trials for their kin relations--siblings and parents--than for non-kin--friends and strangers, F(1, 46) = 4.27, p = .044, answered more trials correctly, F(1, 46) = 4.57, p = .038, and played marginally longer, F(1, 46) = 3.14, p = .083. There was no main effect of recipient when comparing across all four recipients nor significant pairwise comparisons. Five-year-olds (n=24) did not differ when playing for kin versus non-kin (ps > .05). These findings provide initial evidence that four-year-old children calibrate their time and effort in a task differently according to who will reap the rewards, but five-year-olds do not. Five-year-olds may find the task easier and less costly or may have different social experiences having attended school. Nonetheless, we found that children's social decisions depend upon the recipient of their generosity. We provide initial evidence that children may favor kin when the stakes are higher and resources--their time and effort--are more meaningful to them: four-year-olds played more trials and did so more accurately when winning for kin.

%B Cognitive Development Society (CDS) %C Portland, OR %G eng %U https://cogdevsoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CDS2017AbstractBook.pdf %0 Journal Article %J Trends in Cognitive Science %D 2017 %T Mind Games: Game Engines as an Architecture for Intuitive Physics %A Ullman, Tomer D. %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Battaglia, Peter %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %B Trends in Cognitive Science %V 21 %P 649 - 665 %8 09/2017 %G eng %U https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(17)30113-4 %N 9 %) Printer online: June 26, 2017 %& 649 %R 10.1016/j.tics.2017.05.012 %0 Journal Article %J Cognition %D 2017 %T Six-month-old infants expect agents to minimize the cost of their actions %A Shari Liu %A Elizabeth S Spelke %K cognitive development %K goal inference %K open data %K open materials %K social cognition %X

Substantial evidence indicates that infants expect agents to move directly to their goals when no obstacles block their paths, but the representations that articulate this expectation and its robustness have not been characterized. Across three experiments (total N = 60), 6-month-old infants responded to a novel, curvilinear action trajectory on the basis of its efficiency, in accord with the expectation that an agent will move to its goal on the least costly path that the environment affords. Infants expected minimally costly action when presented with a novel constraint, and extended this expectation to agents who had previously acted inefficiently. Infants’ understanding of goal-directed action cannot be explained alone by sen- sitivity to specific features of agent’s actions (e.g. agents tend to move on straight paths, along supporting surfaces, when facing their goals directly) or extrapolations of agents’ past actions to their future ones (e.g. if an agent took the shortest path to an object in the past, it will continue to do so in the future). Instead, infants’ reasoning about efficiency accords with the overhypothesis that agents minimize the cost of their actions.

%B Cognition %V 160 %P 35-42 %8 03/2017 %G eng %U http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002771630302X %R 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.007 %0 Conference Paper %B SRCD %D 2017 %T Spatial cognition across development %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B SRCD %C Austin, TX %G eng %0 Journal Article %J Science %D 2017 %T Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions %A Shari Liu %A Ullman, Tomer D. %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Infants understand that people pursue goals, but how do they learn which goals people prefer? We tested whether infants solve this problem by inverting a mental model of action planning, trading off the costs of acting against the rewards actions bring. After seeing an agent attain two goals equally often at varying costs, infants expected the agent to prefer the goal it attained through costlier actions. These expectations held across three experiments that conveyed cost through different physical path features (height, width, and incline angle), suggesting that an abstract variable—such as “force,” “work,” or “effort”—supported infants’ inferences. We modeled infants’ expectations as Bayesian inferences over utility-theoretic calculations, providing a bridge to recent quantitative accounts of action understanding in older children and adults.

%B Science %V 358 %P 1038-1041 %8 11/2017 %G eng %& 1038 %0 Generic %D 2017 %T Ten-month-old infants infer value from effort %A Shari Liu %A Tomer Ullman %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Society for Research in Child Development %0 Generic %D 2017 %T Ten-month-old infants infer value from effort %A Shari Liu %A Tomer Ullman %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B SRCD %C Austin, TX %0 Generic %D 2017 %T Young children's use of distance and angle information during map reading %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B SRCD %C Austin, TX %0 Journal Article %J Frontiers in Psychology %D 2016 %T Children’s Expectations and Understanding of Kinship as a Social Category %A A C Spokes %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

In order to navigate the social world, children need to understand and make predictions about how people will interact with one another. Throughout most of human history, social groups have been prominently marked by kinship relations, but few experiments have examined children's knowledge of and reasoning about kinship relations.  In the current studies, we investigated how 3- to 5-year-old children understand kinship relations, compared to non-kin relations between friends, with questions such as, “Who has the same grandmother?” We also tested how children expect people to interact based on their relations to one another, with questions such as “Who do you think Cara would like to share her treat with?” Both in a storybook context and in a richer context presenting more compelling cues to kinship using face morphology, 3- and 4-year-old children failed to show either robust explicit conceptual distinctions between kin and friends, or expectations of behavior favoring kin over friends, even when asked about their own social partners. By 5 years, children’s understanding of these relations improved, and they showed some expectation that others will preferentially aid siblings over friends.  Together, these findings suggest that explicit understanding of kinship develops slowly over the preschool years.

%B Frontiers in Psychology %V 7 %P 1664-1078 %G eng %U http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00440/full %N 440 %R 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00440 %0 Book Section %B Scientists Making a Difference: One Hundred Eminent Behavioral and Brain Scientists Talk about Their Most Important Contributions %D 2016 %T Cognitive abilities of infants %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A R. J. Sternberg %A S. T. Fiske %A D. J. Foss %B Scientists Making a Difference: One Hundred Eminent Behavioral and Brain Scientists Talk about Their Most Important Contributions %I Cambridge University Press %C Cambridge, UK %G eng %0 Generic %D 2016 %T Continuous representations of action efficiency in infancy %A Shari Liu %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

In reasoning about action, infants apply the principle of efficiency, recovering attention when agents pursue goals using curvilinear paths if a straight path was available (Csibra et al., 1999). What representations support these capacities? The present research explores the hypothesis that infants represent cost as a continuous function within a naive utility calculus (Jara-Ettinger et al., 2015) by testing 6-month-old infants' expectations for efficiency using action trajectories differing in curvature. In Study 1, we habituated infants to a rational agent, whose goal-directed actions were constrained by tall barriers, and then measured how long infants attended when the same agent navigated over a novel, low barrier efficiently or inefficiently. In Study 2, we asked whether infants recover attention to inefficient actions solely on the basis of low-level perceptual properties by repeating Study 1 but moving the barrier beyond the agent’s goal, causing all actions to be unconstrained. In Study 3, we used the unconstrained habituation events from Study 2 and the constrained test events from Study 1 to test whether infants expect an irrational agent to act efficiently given a novel constraint. Across these studies, we demonstrate that 6-month-olds (1) analyze trajectories of goal-directed action differing in curvature on the basis of their efficiency, (2) expect minimally costly action given novel constraints, even for previously irrational agents, and (3) differentiate between these actions on the basis of efficiency, not low-level perceptual differences in height or motion. Our findings indicate that continuous cost representations support an early, robust expectation for rational action. 

%B CEU Conference on Cognitive Development (BCCCD16) %8 01/2016 %0 Book Section %B Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change %D 2016 %T Core knowledge and conceptual change: A perspective on social cognition %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A D. Barner %A A. S. Baron %B Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change %I Oxford University Press %C New York %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %D 2016 %T Early Reasoning about Affiliation and Social Networks %A A C Spokes %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %C New Orleans, LA %8 05/2016 %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %D 2016 %T Effort as a bridging concept across action and action understanding: Weight and Physical Effort in Predictions of Efficiency in Other Agents %A Tomer Ullman %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %C New Orleans, Louisiana %8 05/2016 %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %D 2016 %T The Functions of Infants’ Social Categorization: Early Reasoning about Affiliation and Social Networks %A A C Spokes %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %C New Orleans, Louisiana %8 05/2016 %G eng %0 Generic %D 2016 %T How Infants Reason About Affective States and Social Interactions %A A C Spokes %E Elizabeth S Spelke %B International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %C New Orleans, Louisiana %8 05/2016 %0 Generic %D 2016 %T The infancy of the human brain %A Dehaene-Lambertz, G. %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

The human infant brain is the only known machine able to master a natural language and develop explicit, symbolic, and communicable systems of knowledge that deliver rich representations of the external world. With the emergence of non-invasive brain imaging, we now have access to the unique neural machinery underlying these early accomplishments. After describing early cognitive capacities in the domains of language and number, we review recent findings that underline the strong continuity between human infants’ and adults’ neural architecture, with notably early hemispheric asymmetries and involvement of frontal areas. Studies of the strengths and limitations of early learning, and of brain dynamics in relation to regional maturational stages, promise to yield a better understanding of the sources of human cognitive achievements.

%8 10/2016 %2

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/103404

%R http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.026 %0 Journal Article %J Developmental Science %D 2016 %T Mastery of the logic of natural numbers is not the result of mastery of counting: Evidence from late counters. %A Julian Jara-Ettinger %A Steve Piantadosi %A Elizabeth S Spelke %A Roger Levy %A Edward Gibson %B Developmental Science %G eng %R 10.1111/desc.12459 %0 Generic %D 2016 %T Pre-reaching infants expect causal agents to act efficiently without motor training %A Shari Liu %A Neon B. Brooks %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B 20th Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %8 05/2016 %0 Generic %D 2016 %T Preverbal Infants' Third-Party Imitator Preferences: Animated Displays versus Filmed Actors %A Heather L Kosakowski %A Lindsey J Powell %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Research on social imitation shows that, from toddlerhood to adulthood, individuals respond more positively to social partners who imitate them compared to those who do not (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Meltzoff, 1990; Agnetta & Rochat, 2004). It is unknown, however, whether (i) positive responses to imitation are present in the first year of life, before infants engage in robust social imitation themselves and (ii) whether positive evaluations of imitators are restricted to direct, 1st person interactions. A recent study found that infants 13 months old and younger who observed imitative and non-imitative interactions between animated, geometric figures looked at and reached for imitators more than non-imitators, but found no difference in looking to targets of imitation versus non-targets (Powell & Spelke, in prep). These data suggest infants may recognize and prefer imitators on the basis of 3rd party observation. However, it is unknown whether this pattern would generalize from simplified, animated displays to more ecologically valid stimuli (e.g. videos of complex human movement).

In our current study, we tested 4- to 5.5-month-old infants (N = 112) using animations and videos of human actors. For both stimulus types, infants saw either two individuals take turns responding to a third, one imitating and one not (responders condition), or one individual respond to two others, imitating one but not the other (initiators condition; Figure 1). In the animated stimuli, each character jumped and made either a high- or low-pitched sound. In the video stimuli each actor made one of two hand motions modified from American Sign Language. The sound or motion matched in imitative interactions but not in non-imitative ones. Depending on condition, the experiment concluded with a differential looking test between either the imitating and non-imitating responder or the imitated and non-imitated initiator. A repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of condition (F(1,97) = 6.58; P < .05) but not of stimulus type (P > 0.8) on infants’ looking during the preference test. Regardless of stimulus type, infants in the responders condition looked longer to imitators (M = 6.79 s) than non-imitators (M = 4.38 s; t(47) = 4.05 P < 0.001), while infants in the targets condition did not differentiate between targets (M = 5.89 s) and non-targets of imitation (M = 6.09 s; t(48) = 0.80; P > 0.2). We are replicating the responders condition using videos of new actors performing simpler actions. Preliminary results indicate infants (N = 14 of an intended 32) continue to look longer at imitators than non-imitators. The congruent results obtained with both animated and video stimuli confirm the validity of the use of animated stimuli for studying infant social cognition. Additionally, these results demonstrate that young infants recognize imitation as 3rd party observers and are biased to attend more to those who have imitated others. Consistent with social imitation research, our results suggest infants may have an early-emerging preference for imitators. This potential preference may lay the foundation for the capacity to engage in socially guided learning. 

%B International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) %C New Orleans, Louisiana %8 05/2016 %0 Journal Article %J Child Development %D 2016 %T Young Children’s Use of Surface and Object Information in Drawings of Everyday Scenes %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Child Development %G eng %R 10.1111/cdev.12658 %0 Journal Article %J British Journal of Developmental Psychology %D 2015 %T Children's expectations about training the approximate number system. %A Moira R Dillon %A Pires, A. C. %A Hyde, D. C. %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Humans possess a developmentally precocious and evolutionarily ancient Approximate Number System (ANS) whose sensitivity correlates with uniquely human symbolic arithmetic skills. Recent studies suggest that ANS training improves symbolic arithmetic, but such studies may engender performance expectations in their participants that in turn produce the improvement. Here we assessed 6- to 8-year-old children’s expectations about the effects of numerical and non-numerical magnitude training, as well as states of satiety and restfulness, in the context of a study linking children’s ANS practice to their improved symbolic arithmetic. We found that children did not expect gains in symbolic arithmetic after exercising the ANS, though they did expect gains in ANS acuity after training on any magnitude task. Moreover, children expected gains in symbolic arithmetic after a good night’s sleep and their favorite breakfast. Thus, children’s improved symbolic arithmetic after ANS training cannot be explained by their expectations about that training.

%B British Journal of Developmental Psychology %V 33 %G eng %N 4 %& 411 %0 Conference Paper %B Cognitive Development Society Post-Conference, More on Development %D 2015 %T Connecting core cognition, spatial symbols, and the abstract concepts of formal geometry. %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Cognitive Development Society Post-Conference, More on Development %G eng %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Early Reasoning about Affiliation and Caregiving %A A C Spokes %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Considerable  research  has  examined  infants’  reasoning  about  and  evaluations  of  social  agents,  but  two  questions  remain  unanswered: First, do infants organize observed social relations into larger structures, inferring the relationship between t wo social  beings  based  on  their  relations  to  a  third  party?  Second,  how  do  infants  reaso n  about  a  type  of  social  relations  prominent  in  all  societies:  kinship  relations  that  modulate  caregiving?  In  a  series  of  experiments  using  animated  events,  we  ask  whether  9 - ,  11 - ,  and 15 - to 18 - month - old infants expect two babies  who  were comforted by the same caregiver, or two caregivers  who comforted  the same baby, to affiliate with one another. We find that older infants make these inferences in a caregiving context, but n ot in a  different context involving social interactions among adults. Thus, infant s are sensitive to at least one aspect of kinship relations — caregiving — and organize these relations into larger social structures.

%B Cognitive Development Society (CDS) %8 01/2015 %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Early reasoning about affiliation and kinship. %A A C Spokes %A Elizabeth S Spelke %I Poster presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, PA %8 03/2015 %0 Generic %D 2015 %T From spatial symbols to Euclidean intuitions. %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Biennial Meeting of Cognitive Development Society %0 Generic %D 2015 %T From spatial symbols to Euclidean intuitions %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Euclidean  geometry  is  highly  intuitive  to  adults  from  diverse  cultures,  but  the  sources  of  these  intuitions  remain  unknown.  The  present study investigates whether children’s understanding of Euclidean geometry is linked to their use of spatial symbols.  Six - ,  10,  and  12 - year - old  children  were  given  tests  of  navigation  by  purely  geometric  maps, which  required  them  to  place  objects  in  fragmented  3D  environments  using  2D  maps  highlighting  the  same  or  different  geometric  information  as  the  3D  environments.  Children  also  completed  a  test  of  abstract  geometric  reasoning  focused  on  triangle  completion .  Performance  on  the  geometric  reasoning  test  improved  markedly  with  age,  and  this  improvement  was  associated  with  more  integrated  interpretations  of  the  geometric  maps  and  environments.  These  findings  connect  the  achievement  of  Euclidean  intuitions  to  the mastery  of  spatial  symbols.

%B Cognitive Development Society (CDS) %C Columbus, OH %8 10/2015 %U http://cogdevsoc.org/sites/default/files/Official%20Full%20Conference%20Proceedings_10.10.pdf %0 Journal Article %J Neuron %D 2015 %T The Infancy of the Human Brain %A Dehaene-Lambertz, G. %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Neuron %V 88 %P 93 - 109 %8 Jan-10-2015 %G eng %U http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0896627315008156 %N 1 %! Neuron %R 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.026 %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Infants’ Categorization of Social Actions %A Lindsey J Powell %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Infants use information about efficiency to identify agents’ physical goals. But how do they recognize actions with social rather than physical functions? They may rely on an understanding that socially meaningful actions work not by efficiently enacting physical changes, but instead through shared use across group members. We found support for this hypothesis across several experiments that probed the conditions under which 8- and 9-month-old infants expect an action to be performed by additional members of the initial actor's social group. Infants generalized actions to new members of social groups if and only if the actions in question werenon-instrumental and infants had observed two socially related individuals repeating the action, whether or not they were members of the group across which generalization was tested. Thus, infants use characteristics of social behavior – physical inefficiency and shared use by group members – to categorize actions as social.

%B Cognitive Development Society (CDS) %C Columbus, OH %8 10/2015 %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Infants’ Reasoning about Affiliation and Caregiving %A A C Spokes %E Elizabeth S Spelke %B Cognitive Development Society (CDS) | More on Development workshop %C Columbus, Ohio %8 10/2015 %G eng %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Infants’ Reasoning about Affiliation and Caregiving %A A C Spokes %E Elizabeth S Spelke %B Cognitive Development Society (CDS) Biennial Meeting %8 10/2015 %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Infants’ sensitivity to shape changes. %A Moira R Dillon %A Izard, V. %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B Cognitive Development Society Pre-Conference on the Development of Spatial Thinking %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Isolating angle in infants' detection of shape %A Moira R Dillon %A Véronique Izard %A Elizabeth S Spelke %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Preverbal Infants' Third-Party Imitator Preferences: Animated Displays versus Filmed Actors %A Heather L Kosakowski %A Lindsey J Powell %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B CBMM Summer Research Program %C MIT, Cambridge, MA %8 08/2015 %0 Conference Paper %B 2015 Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting %D 2015 %T Reorientation ability predicts early spatial symbol reading %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B 2015 Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting %G eng %0 Generic %D 2015 %T Six-month-old infants represent action efficiency on a continuous scale. %A Shari Liu %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B 9th Biennial Meeting of the Cognitive Development Society (CDS) %C Columbus, Ohio %8 10/2015 %0 Conference Paper %B Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development %D 2015 %T Young children’s automatic and alternating use of scene and object information in spatial symbols. %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Although symbolic understanding has long been studied, little is known about the 2D shape information children use to relate symbols to their 3D referents. Our previous research suggests that young children rely on length and angle to find locations on objects, but on distance and direction to find locations in scenes. These studies, however, either presented drawings from non-canonical perspectives or probed children’s use of symbols in unusual environments. Moreover, these studies explored the factors that limit children’s understanding of spatial symbols, not the sources of their flexibility in this domain.

For the present study, we showed 144 4-year-old children three types of drawings of a typical room, depicting the room’s objects, its extended surfaces, or both. In one task, children used the drawings to find targets located either at the junction of two extended surfaces in a room or next to objects in the room. In another task, children judged whether drawings that include just scene or just object information are better depictions of targets at these two types of locations.

            We found that the limitations previously observed in children’s use of spatial symbols extend to highly realistic perspectival drawings: children perform better with scene drawings when targets are located at the junctions of extended surfaces in the room and better with object targets when targets are located near objects, but gain no additional benefit when presented with both types of information. In addition, children show no awareness of this pattern in their performance: they judge drawings of objects to be more informative of all target locations. Common drawings evidently present geometric information in a format automatically accessible to cognitive systems for navigation and object recognition. Young children nevertheless fail to integrate the information that these systems represent, even when shown drawings of the most familiar and natural kinds.

%B Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development %G eng %0 Journal Article %J Developmental Science %D 2014 %T Core geometry in perspective %A Moira R Dillon %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Research on animals, infants, children, and adults provides evidence that distinct cognitive systems underlie navigation and object recognition. Here we examine whether and how these systems interact when children interpret 2D edge-based perspectival line drawings of scenes and objects. Such drawings serve as symbols early in development, and they preserve scene and object geometry from canonical points of view. Young children show limits when using geometry both in non-symbolic tasks and in symbolic map tasks that present 3D contexts from unusual, unfamiliar points of view. When presented with the familiar viewpoints in perspectival line drawings, however, do children engage more integrated geometric representations? In three experiments, children successfully interpreted line drawings with respect to their depicted scene or object. Nevertheless, children recruited distinct processes when navigating based on the information in these drawings, and these processes depended on the context in which the drawings were presented. These results suggest that children are flexible but limited in using geometric information to form integrated representations of scenes and objects, even when interpreting spatial symbols that are highly familiar and faithful renditions of the visual world.

%B Developmental Science %8 11/2014 %G eng %R 10.1111/desc.12266 %0 Generic %D 2014 %T Imitation Preferences of Preverbal Infants. %A Heather L Kosakowski %A Lindsey J Powell %A Elizabeth S Spelke %B CBMM Summer Research Program %I Poster presentation at the Center for Brain Minds and Machines Summer Conference, Cambridge, MA %8 08/2014 %0 Journal Article %J Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America %D 2013 %T Core foundations of abstract geometry %A Moira R Dillon %A Yi Huang %A Elizabeth S Spelke %X

Human adults from diverse cultures share intuitions about the points, lines, and figures of Euclidean geometry. Do children develop these intuitions by drawing on phylogenetically ancient and developmentally precocious geometric representations that guide their navigation and their analysis of object shape? In what way might these early-arising representations support later-developing Euclidean intuitions? To approach these questions, we investigated the relations among young children’s use of geometry in tasks assessing: navigation; visual form analysis; and the interpretation of symbolic, purely geometric maps. Children’s navigation depended on the distance and directional relations of the surface layout and predicted their use of a symbolic map with targets designated by surface distances. In contrast, children’s analysis of visual forms depended on the size-invariant shape relations of objects and predicted their use of the same map but with targets designated by corner angles. Even though the two map tasks used identical instructions and map displays, children’s performance on these tasks showed no evidence of integrated representations of distance and angle. Instead, young children flexibly recruited geometric representations of either navigable layouts or objects to interpret the same spatial symbols. These findings reveal a link between the early-arising geometric representations that humans share with diverse animals and the flexible geometric intuitions that give rise to human knowledge at its highest reaches. Although young children do not appear to integrate core geometric representations, children’s use of the abstract geometry in spatial symbols such as maps may provide the earliest clues to the later construction of Euclidean geometry.

%B Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America %V 110 %G eng %N 35 %& 14191