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2007 Kendon Smith Lecture Series |
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The University of North Carolina at Greensboro Department of Psychology presents the 2007 Kendon Smith Lecture Series The Kendon Smith Lectures are free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served 30 minutes before the presentations. We encourage you to arrive early for proper seating. Parking is available ($5 per day) in the McIver Parking Deck, which is right across the street from the New Science Building. Please see http://parking.uncg.edu/map.html for a campus map and additional information on the lectures is available from Melanie Nickerson, mdnicker@uncg.edu, (336) 334-5480, or at www.uncg.edu/psy/kendonsmith.htm |
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Scheduled speakers include:
Andrew Meltzoff
Brooks, R., & Meltzoff, A.N. (2002). The importance of eyes: How infants interpret adult looking behavior. Developmental Psychology, 38, 958-966.
Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Kuhl, P. K. (1999). The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us about the mind. New York, NY: William Morrow & Co.
Meltzoff, A. N. (2007). ‘Like me’: A foundation for social cognition. Developmental Science, 10, 126-134.
Meltzoff, A. N. (2007). The ‘like me’ framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent. Acta Psychologica, 124, 26-43. Patricia Bauer
Lukowski, A. F., Wiebe, S. A., Haight, J. C., DeBoer, T., Nelson, C. A., & Bauer, P. J. (2005). Forming a stable memory representation in the first year of life: Why imitation is more than child’s play. Developmental Science, 8, 279-298. Susan Gelman
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press. Gelman, S. A. (2004). Psychological essentialism in children. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 404-409. Gelman, S. A., Taylor, M G., & Nguyen, S. (2004). Mother-child conversations about gender: Understanding the acquisition of essentialist beliefs. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Volume 69, No. 1. Goldin-Meadow, S., Gelman, S. A., & Mylander, C. (2005). Expressing generic concepts with and without a language model. Cognition, 96, 109-126. Duane Rumbaugh
Rumbaugh, D. M. (2002). Emergents and rational behaviorism. Eye on Psi Chi, 6, 8-14. Rumbaugh, D. M., King, J. E., Beran, M. J., Washburn, D. A., & Gould, K. (2007). A salience theory of learning and behavior – with perspectives on neurobiology and cognition. International Journal of Primatology, 28, DOI: 10.1007/s10764-007-9179-8. Rumbaugh, D. M. & Washburn, D. A. (2003). Intelligence of apes and other rational beings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. |
Abstract: Some of the most important advances in cognitive science have come from the crib and the nursery. The scientific discoveries from developmental psychology have changed our ideas about infants and young children and about the nature of the growing mind. The new research is especially informative about ‘social cognition’—our understanding of other people and the mapping between self and other. We now know that human infants are born with the ability to connect to other people: They are little imitation machines. At a more theoretical level, I will suggest that imitation provides a foundation for the later development of ‘theory of mind.’ Infants recognize that other people are ‘like me’ in their actions (behavioral imitation) and from these roots they develop the idea that others are ‘like me’ in their internal mental states (theory of mind). I will trace the development in social cognition from birth through early childhood, building bridges between allied disciplines: developmental science, social psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. 
Abstract: The field of cognitive development underwent a dramatic change in the 1980s. Within a few short years, the perspective on the intellectual life of infants and very young children changed from one of impoverishment to one of immense riches. Out was the notion that the young of our species live a limited mental life, one qualitatively different from that of adults. In was the notion that the young organism is equipped with virtually all it needs to think great thoughts right along with the rest of us. The change in perspective occurred in no small part thanks to advances in methodologies suitable for probing the thoughts of silent subjects. Among the most productive of methods has been imitation of the actions of another. In this talk I will describe the development of imitation-based tasks for the study of memory and summarize our knowledge of its development in the first years of life. I will also present data indicating that for infants, imitation is more than child’s play: enhancing effects of the opportunity to imitate are apparent in behavior and in more robust patterns of neural processing. 
Abstract: For humans, one of the most widespread means of transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next is language. In this talk I will focus on two powerful expressive functions that all languages have: naming (thereby expressing category membership), and scope (thereby expressing how broadly one can generalize from experience). I argue that these functions are difficult, perhaps impossible, to convey without the symbolic representational system of language. I discuss evidence from naturalistic parent-child conversations as well as experimental studies with preschool children, showing that these expressive functions of language are available to young children from a young age, and are used by them to interpret their experiences. However, despite this evidence that languages (universally) shape children’s learning, I also suggest that language per se is not the source of these conceptual abilities. Instead, language serves as a tool to embellish learning capacities that young children share with other, non-human species.
Abstract: A beautiful challenge awaits us as we try to account for the origins of intelligence as manifested in creative and innovative behaviors. We will call such behaviors emergents. Emergents generally appear quite unexpectedly and need not reflect specific training or experience. The literature is replete with instances of emergents in primates, mammals, and birds that simply cannot be accounted for by instinct or traditional conditioning. Even the most specific experiences of life need not constrain either behavior or what is learned to specific forms and functions. To understand emergents, we will examine the nature of learning and behavior of everyday life, with its rich social and environmental interactions, within a new framework (Rumbaugh, King, Beran, Washburn & Gould, 2007). The framework embraces the roots of learning and behavior from instinct through conditioning and observational learning and on through cognition to intelligence in its most creative emergent forms of composition and invention.