Speaker:

• Linda B. Smith
  Chancellor's Professor
  Indiana University
  

Details:

Cognition, behavior, and development all happen in real time, through sensory-motor interactions with a physical world.

In his classic theory of the emergence of cognition, Piaget proposed that infant cognition was grounded in these sensory-motor interactions and, indeed, limited by its very sensory-motor nature.

One phenomenon that Piaget used to illustrate these ideas was the object concept as manifested in a task that has come to be known as the A not-B task. Infant's perseverative searches for hidden objects in that task suggested object representations tightly tied to the here and now of perceiving and acting.

In this talk, I will present evidence that Piaget was right; infant performance in the classic tasks used to measure the object concept are deeply tied to sensory-motor processes. I will then argue and present evidence that this seeming example of the sensory-motor nature of immature is revealing about a fundamental aspect of all of human cognition and its tie to the physical world through the sensory-motor system. In making this case.

I present a formal model and new evidence on infant performance in the A-not-B task, and an extension of that model to and new evidence on children's binding of names to objects. The processes that underlie the A-not-B error and the processes that bind names to things are fundamentally the same and lie close to the sensory-motor surface.

This "Year of Languages" event is sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Science, with additional support from Human Development and Applied Psychology, OISE/UT, the Faculty of Information Studies, the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Students Association, and the Cognitive Science Program.