Section 11.1
• What is the basic idea behind the dishabituation paradigm? How plausible do you think it is as a way of assessing infant knowledge?
• How does Spelke think that her dishabituation experiments should be interpreted?
• Do you agree with Spelke’s interpretation?
Section 11.2
• How does Munakata’s model of object permanence work? What do you think it tells us about object permanence?
• What is the balance beam problem and why is it important?
• What should we conclude from the neural network model of the balance beam problem described in the text?
Section 11.3
• What is the dilemma that Fodor and Pylyshyn pose for neural network models?
• At which of Marr’s three levels do you think that neural network models should be located?
Dr. Baillargeon- understanding object permanence (video from YouTube)
Object Concept VOE Ramp Study (video from YouTube)
How infants learn: Dr. Renee Baillargeon (talk by Baillargeon from YouTube Vanderbilt University channel)
Piaget-stage 1-sensorimotor, object permanence (video from YouTube)
Interview with Elizabeth Spelke (video from The New York Times)
11.1 Object Permanence and Physical Reasoning in Infancy
Infants’ reasoning about hidden objects: Evidence for event-general and event-specific expectations (paper by Baillargeon, 2004, in Developmental Science)
Object permanence in five-month-old infants (paper by Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman, 1985, in Cognition)
Representing the existence and the location of hidden objects: Object permanence in 6- and 8-month-old infants (paper by Baillargeon, 1986, in Cognition)
Object permanence in 3½- and 4½-month-old infants (paper by Baillargeon, 1987, in Developmental Psychology)
Detecting impossible changes in infancy: a three-system account (paper by Wang and Baillargeon, 2008, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences)
Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy (paper by Kellman and Spelke, 1983, in Cognitive Psychology)
Using Habituation of Looking Time to Assess Mental Processes in Infancy (paper by Oakes, 2010, in Journal of Cognition and Development)
Science and core knowledge (paper by Carey and Spelke, 1996, in Philosophy of Science)
Core knowledge (paper by Spelke and Kinzler, 2007, in Developmental Science)
Physics for infants: characterizing the origins of knowledge about objects, substances, and number (paper by Hespos and van Marle, 2012, in WIREs Cognitive Science)
Core cognition and beyond: The acquisition of physical and numerical knowledge (book chapter by Baillargeon and Carey, 2012, in arly Childhood Development and Later Outcome)
11.2 Neural Network Models of Children’s Physical Reasoning
Rethinking Infant Knowledge: Toward an Adaptive Process Account of Successes and Failures in Object Permanence Tasks (paper by Munakata et al., 1997, in Psychological Review)
Graded representations in behavioral dissociations (paper by Munakata 2001, in Trends in Cognitive Science)
Learning to perceive object unity: a connectionist account (paper by Mareschal and Johnson, 2002, in Developmental Science)
Connectionist models of development (paper by Munakata and McClelland, 2003, in Developmental Science)
Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis (paper by Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988, in Cognition)
Strong systematicity through sensorimotor conceptual grounding: an unsupervised, developmental approach to connectionist sentence processing (paper by Jansen and Watter, 2012, in Connection Science)
