Contact: (336) 334-4314
Posted 11-1-07
GREENSBORO, NC – The annual Kendon Smith Lecture Series at UNCG will examine social influences on the development of thought Friday and Saturday, Nov. 9 and 10, in Room 101 of the Science Building.
The Department of Psychology sponsors the lectures, which are free and open to the public. This year’s topic is “Monkey See Monkey Do: Humans See Humans Learn? Social Influences on the Development of Thought.”
The Kendon Smith Lecture Series has been bringing national and international experts to UNCG since 1984, when Janice Stewart Baucom of Concord established an endowment to honor Dr. Kendon Smith. Smith served as head of the psychology department from 1954-67 and held an Alumni Professorship from 1969 until his retirement in 1983. He died in 2002.
The schedule for this year’s event, including lecture previews provided by the speakers, is as follows:
Friday, Nov. 9
• 2:45-4 p.m. Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington, “Roots of Social Cognition: The ‘Like Me’ Hypothesis”
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, this lecture 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). This lecture 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.
• 4:15-5:30 p.m. Dr. Patricia Bauer, Emory University, “The Versatility of Imitation: A Tool to Study and Enhance Thought”
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.
This lecture 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. It 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.
Saturday, Nov. 10
• 9 a.m. – Continental Breakfast
• 9:30 am – Dr. Susan Gelman, University of Michigan, “Language as a Tool for Thought: Evidence from Young Children”
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).
The lecture will argue that these functions are difficult, perhaps impossible, to convey without the symbolic representational system of language. It will 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.
• 11 a.m. – Dr. Duane Rumbaugh, Great Ape Trust of Iowa, “Why and How Monkeys, Apes, and Humans Learn by Observation and Social Influence: The Roots of Intelligence via Basic Processes”
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.
• 12:15-12:45 p.m. – Roundtable discussion with all four speakers
