Children's perceptions of objectivity: In this research study, we are interested in how children think about the knowledge of others. Your child will hear stories about different characters, and then answer questions about the knowledge and beliefs of those characters based on the information from the story.For more information, contact Candice Mills at candice.mills@yale.edu.
Deference in Categorization: This project investigates under what conditions adults and children defer to experts when deciding whether something is a member of a particular category. Participants are given scenarios about ambiguous objects or animals and asked questions about what type of expert, if any, they should consult. How we rely on the knowledge of others tells us how we structure our knowledge of the world: our intuitive beliefs about biology, man-made objects, and other phenomena. For more information, contact Caroline Proctor at caroline.proctor@yale.edu.
Children's understanding of object function: In this study, we are investigating how children think about how tools work. Children listen to brief scenarios, accompanied by illustrations, in which characters use a variety of tools to perform different functions, such as opening a box, cleaning a table, or cutting wire. Children are then asked to make simple decisions about how the tools can be used in different contexts and on new objects. For more information, contact Marissa Greif at marissa.greif@yale.edu.
Children's estimation of knowledge: In this study we are interested in investigating young children's understanding of children's and adult's knowledge. In this study, each child will be asked to judge how much people at different ages know about various phenomena. We are interested in exploring the degree to which young children may overestimate adults' knowledge.For more information, contact the Lab Manager at cogdevlab@yale.edu.
Children's intuitions about time: My current research examines children's intuitions of time. We have all felt that time flies by when we have a good time and experienced the agony of a boring lecture appearing to last an eternity. The current work focuses on this type of contrast. We are interested in whether or not the type of experience influences a child's idea about the concept of time as well as the duration of it. Visit my homepage at pantheon.yale.edu/~ksc28/index for more about my research works. For more information, contact Katherine Choe at katherine.choe@yale.edu.
Children's understanding of essence: This study looks at how children assign an object to a particular group or category. For example, one story your child might hear tells about scientists who are discussing how to figure out if a raccoon is a real raccoon or a skunk that is in a raccoon costume. The story is followed with questions framed in a way to probe how children interpret the information, and how they think about which category an animal might beling to. For more information, contact George Newman at george.newman@yale.edu.
Children's clustering of biological and psychological phenomena: In this research study, we are interested in finding out how people think about different human biological and psychological phenomena, and particularly whether or not children differentiate human biology from psychology. For each item the child will be asked whom to consult if they want to know some fact&emdash;someone who has knowledge about certain psychological phenomena, or someone who has knowledge about certain biological phenomena. For more information, contact Jane Erickson at jane.erickson@yale.edu.
Children's understanding of the mind-body distinction: In this research study, we are interested in finding out how children think about different biological processes and the degree to which the mind has control over them. Children will be presented with different scenarios depicting natural biological processes and will then be asked some questions about it. For more information, contact Jane Erickson at jane.erickson@yale.edu.
Adults' understanding of scientific explanations: What makes some explanations better than others? This research project addresses this questions, focusing specifically on explanations for psychological phenomena. We give adults different types of exaplanations and analyze their judgements about these explanations to discover what are the characteristics of good explanations and if adults wil mistakenly judge bad explanations to be good. For more information, contact Deena Skolnick at deena.skolnick@yale.edu.
Children, chimps, and tools: examining over-imitation in early childhood: Children are spectacularly proficient imitators, and have long been the gold standard to which animal cognition researchers compare the social learning abilities of other species. The accepted logic has been that imitation is the most sophisticated form of social learning, and that the failure of species such as non-human primates to engage in it is indicative of a fundamental shortfall in their cognitive abilities relative to those of human children. New results, however, are beginning to challenge this view. Horner and Whiten (Anim. Cog., in press) have recently shown that chimps appear to be more savvy than children in some imitative tasks. Specifically, when chimps watch a series of actions that culminate in the attainment of a reward, they reproduce only those actions that are actually necessary for the goal and discard those that are irrelevant or counterproductive. When shown the same demonstrations, children mechanically reproduce all of the manipulations, even the ones that are clearly not goal relevant. Why do chimps outsmart children in this way? Using novel stimuli such as 'puzzle fruit' and specially constructed tools, we are investigating what aspects of a demonstration -- e.g. things like intentionality, perceived competence and attentiveness of the actor, etc. -- are necessary to produce this sort of over-imitative behavior. By comparing the behavior of children to that of capuchin monkeys, we hope to gain new insight into the role that imitation plays in early cognitive development. For more information on this project, contact Derek Lyons at derek.lyons@yale.edu.
The agent/object distinction in adult perception: In recent years it has become increasingly clear that even very young infants command an impressive degree of knowledge about their social and physical worlds. From as early as five months, infants recognize complex intentional relationships such as the referential nature of pointing and the goal-directedness of grasping. Similarly, infants at this age have a well-developed intuitive physics that specifies constraints such as the continuity of object motion. Quite startlingly, however, it has recently been reported that these two types of understanding do not appear to coordinate early in development (Kuhlmeier, Wynn, and Bloom, 2004). That is, though five-month-olds are surprised if a soccer ball appears to have moved from point A to point B without traversing a continuous intervening path, they appear unconcerned when human actors do the same thing. One possible implication of this finding is that the understanding that people are both agents and objects is not innate but rather the end-point of a developmental trajectory; we have to learn across our early ontogeny that both of these component representations should be bound to physically embodied agents. In adults this double representational binding has presumably become almost completely automatic; it is possible, however, that it still requires some non-negligible amount of cognitive effort to maintain. Thus, under conditions of extremely high cognitive load, it may be possible for us to detect brief lapses in this representational coherency, transient moments at which adults fail to detect continuity violations for animate agents in much the same fashion as five-month-old infants. It is the search for these transient glitches in adult representation that we are undertaking in this study. Experience with visual perception research techniques, computer programming or computer animation would be particularly desirable for this project (but not mandatory). For more information, contact Derek Lyons at derek.lyons@yale.edu.
