Heidi Kloos

When Looks Are Everything Appearance Similarity Versus Kind Information in Early Induction

The goal of this research was to examine mechanisms underlying early induction—specifically, the relation between induction and categorization. Some researchers argue that even early in development, induction is based on category-membership information, whereas others argue that early induction is based primarily on similarity. Children 4 and 5 years of age participated in two types of tasks: categorization and induction. Both tasks were performed with artificial animal-like categories in which appearance was pitted against category membership. Although the children readily acquired category-membership information and subsequently used this information in categorization tasks, they ignored category membership during the induction task, relying instead on the appearance of items. These results support the idea that early in development, induction is similarity based.

Living in the Pink: Intentionality, Wellbeing, and Complexity

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses how coordination is essential to cognition and behavior. It begins with problems inherited from conventional cognitive science, for example the question of intentionality. Then, it discusses theoretical terms of complexity science that have proven useful in cognitive and behavioral science. They culminate in the ideas of self-organized criticality and soft-assembly: Living systems are attracted to optimal temporary states of flexible coordination, which best guarantees contextually appropriate behavior and the wellbeing of the actor. In addition, it describes the conceptual building blocks of complexity with respect to brains, bodies, and behavior. These include constraints, phase transitions, interdependence, and self-organized criticality—concepts that address emergent coordination among system components. Further, it discusses ubiquitous pink noise in human performance. Pink noise is a fundamentally complex phenomenon that reflects an optimal coordination among the components of person and task environment. Discussion concludes with a survey of present challenges and opportunities for complexity and cognitive science.

What's Behind Different Kinds of Kinds: Effects of Statistical Density on Learning and Representation of Categories

This research examined how differences in category structure affect category learning and category representation across points of development. The authors specifically focused on category density--or the proportion of category-relevant variance to the total variance. Results of Experiments 1-3 showed a clear dissociation between dense and sparse categories: Whereas dense categories were readily learned without supervision, learning of sparse categories required supervision. There were also developmental differences in how statistical density affected category representation. Although children represented both dense and sparse categories on the basis of the overall similarity (Experiment 4A), adults represented dense categories on the basis of similarity and represented sparse categories on the basis of the inclusion rule (Experiment 4B). The results support the notion that statistical structure interacts with the learning regime in their effects on category learning. In addition, these results elucidate important developmental differences in how categories are represented, which presents interesting challenges for theories of categorization.

7 Origins of Order in Cognitive Activity

Origins of Order in Cognitive Activity Most cognitive scientists have run across The War of the Ghosts, a Native American story used by Bartlett (1932) in his classic studies of remembering. British college students read the story twice and recalled it in detail after 15 minutes, hours, days, months, or years “as opportunity offered” (p. 65). The compelling finding was that participants reinterpreted parts of the story, in addition to omitting details. The mystical story was reorganized and changed in the retelling to fit cultural norms of the British participants. In other words, errors in retelling the story were neither random nor arbitrary but fit together within a larger created narrative. The memory errors illustrate the ordinary constructive performance of cognition and the creation of orderly and sensible thought. Despite perpetually moving eyes, swaying body, and ambiguous stimuli, people perceive coherent and orderly objects. Despite the lack of explicit links between events, higher-order cognition fits thought and behavior within larger coherent narratives. However, the origin of such order remains a mystery. What is the basis of orderly thought, memory, speech, and other cognitive abilities? The origin of order in cognition is the topic of this chapter. We begin with a discussion of how order is explained within a traditional approach of information processing. Taking the shortcomings of this account seriously, we then turn to other disciplines – those that have framed the question of order more successfully.

The Role of Reading Time Complexity and Reading Speed in Text Comprehension.

Reading speed is commonly used as an index of reading fluency. However, reading speed is not a consistent predictor of text comprehension, when speed and comprehension are measured on the same text within the same reader. This might be due to the somewhat ambiguous nature of reading speed, which is sometimes regarded as a feature of the reading process, and sometimes as a product of that process. We argue that both reading speed and comprehension should be seen as the result of the reading process, and that the process of fluent text reading can instead be described by complexity metrics that quantify aspects of the stability of the reading process. In this article, we introduce complexity metrics in the context of reading and apply them to data from a self-paced reading study. In this study, children and adults read a text silently or aloud and answered comprehension questions after reading. Our results show that recurrence metrics that quantify the degree of temporal structure in reading times yield better prediction of text comprehension compared to reading speed. However, the results for fractal metrics are less clear. Furthermore, prediction of text comprehension is generally strongest and most consistent across silent and oral reading when comprehension scores are normalized by reading speed. Analyses of word length and word frequency indicate that the observed complexity in reading times is not a simple function of the lexical properties of the text, suggesting that text reading might work differently compared to reading of isolated word or sentences.

Interlinking physical beliefs : Children's bias towards logical congruence

Young childrens naïve beliefs about physics are commonly studied as isolated pieces of knowledge. The current paper takes a different approach. It asks whether preschoolers interlink individual beliefs into larger configurations or Gestalts. Such Gestalts bring together knowledge such as how an objects mass relates to its sinking speed, how an objects volume relates to its sinking speed, and how mass and volume are correlated. The particular form of organization explored here is referred to as logical congruence, the logical correspondence in directions among three physical relations. Are childrens guesses about one physical relation congruent with their beliefs about the other two relations? And can they learn a congruent set of relations more readily than an incongruent set? Two different physical domains were explored, one in which children commonly hold pre-existing beliefs, and one in which they are likely to lack such beliefs. The results in both domains show a strong bias towards congruent knowledge configurations in young children. These findings may explain childrens difficulties learning inherently incongruous concepts such as density.

Providing impetus for conceptual change: The effect of organizing the input

Abstract This study was designed to test whether calling to mind an initial belief and presenting information that challenges that belief affects the extent to which preschoolers will modify it. The belief that was challenged in a controlled demonstration concerns the effect of the size of an object on its sinking speed (holding weight constant). In addition, childrens belief about the effect of weight on sinking speed (holding size constant) was examined, a belief that was confirmed in a demonstration. The final belief about size for those who received nothing but empirical demonstrations was less likely to be compatible with the demonstration than the final belief of those in two other conditions. Children in the other conditions were given the opportunity in the context of interviews to form expectations about how size and weight separately relate to sinking speed, in addition to receiving the demonstrations. An interview either directly preceded the demonstration for the variable concerned (coordinated sequence) or did not (uncoordinated sequence). The tendency for the final belief about size to be compatible with the demonstration was related more strongly to age in the condition with an uncoordinated sequence than in either of the other conditions. Some children among those whose final belief about the effect of size on sinking speed was compatible with the demonstration also refined their belief about the effect of weight, suggesting that these two beliefs may cohere as a system. These findings show that a relatively short experimental procedure can be an effective means of bringing about some refinement of a young childs beliefs.

Situated naive physics: task constraints decide what children know about density.

Childrens understanding of density is riddled with misconceptions-or so it seems. Yet even preschoolers at times appear to understand density. This article seeks to reconcile these conflicting outcomes by investigating the nature of constraints available in different experimental protocols. Protocols that report misconceptions about density used stimulus arrangements that make differences in mass and volume more salient than differences in density. In contrast, protocols that report successful performance used stimulus arrangements that might have increased the salience of density. To test this hypothesis, the present experiments manipulate the salience of object density. Children between 2 and 9 years of age and adults responded whether an object would sink or float when placed in water. Results indicated that childrens performance on exactly the same objects differed as a function of the saliency of the dimension of density, relative to the dimensions of mass and volume. These results support the idea that constraints--rather than stable knowledge--drive performance, with implications for teaching children about nonobvious concepts such as density.

What's Beyond Looks?: Reply to Gelman and Waxman

In our target article (Sloutsky, Kloos, & Fisher, 2007), we presented evidence that when category information is in conflict with appearance similarity, young children’s induction is based on similarity and not on category information. These findings challenge a central tenet of the knowledge-based approach— the idea that even early in development, induction is category based. Gelman and Waxman (2007, this issue) argue that because we used arbitrary groupings, our findings tell little about induction with real natural kinds. In what follows, we first respond to Gelman and Waxman’s arguments. We then return to a broader debate, arguing that the knowledge-based approach is underspecified and thus has too much flexibility when dealing with disconfirming evidence.

Can a Preschooler’s Mistaken Belief Benefit Learning?

Young children erroneously believe that differences either in mass alone or in volume alone can predict differences in sinking speed. The current study was an attempt to teach preschool children that neither mass nor volume alone is predictive for sinking speed. Instead, it is the average density of an object that can predict differences in sinking speed. Twenty-four 4-to 6-year-olds participated. In an initial phase, children’s mistaken beliefs about the effects of mass and volume on sinking speed were called to their minds. Then they were presented with demonstrations of sinking objects that disconfirmed these mistaken beliefs. The findings show that preschool children can replace mistaken beliefs and learn that two dimensions, originally thought of as being relevant, are indeed irrelevant. Children who did not perform correctly demonstrated a mass bias. The results also shed light on the origins of this bias.