Norman H. Freeman

Infant search tasks reveal early concepts of containment and canonical usage of objects.

Abstract It is difficult to gain unambiguous evidence on the use of concepts by infants. Many results can be accounted for in terms of action-based strategies. The evidence reported here fulfils the minimal criteria for the operation of working concepts in infants. Search tasks are used with a filled interval which forces memory-search, and the object is hidden in containers which fulfil their customary job or violate it. Infants treat an upright cup as a more reliable location marker than an inverted one. A series of experiments probes the phenomenon. The results indicate that the infants have a working concept of containment which can be triggered by the provision of containers in their canonical orientation. Even “object permanence tasks” lead infants to access their knowledge of the relationships into which things typically enter in the world outside the laboratory.

Children's Strategies in Producing Three-Dimensional Relationships on a Two-Dimensional Surface

Abstract It is a common task to give children a picture containing implicit depth cues and to require them to extract depth information from it. The cues are always selected from the adult repertoire; little is known about childrens production of their own cues. In this experiment, 5- to 10-year-old children were required to draw one object behind another in a situation in which adults invariably produce the further object partially occluded by the nearer. The results were an age-related decline in the tendency to segregate the objects and an increase in the tendency to group the objects using partial occlusion, with a cross-over at 8 years. At all ages some children drew one object inside the boundary of the other. It is argued that the results are composed of two tendencies, a gradual mastery of discrete scaling phenomena (e.g., “up” on the page means “further”) within a given style, and a set of decisions to be made between incompatible styles.

Representation of the cardinality principle: early conception of error in a counterfactual test

There is debate over how the integration of non-verbal quantifying and verbal counting relates to the representation of number principles. A stringent representational test would be one in which a child obeyed a number principle where it ran counter to a characteristic procedure. We devised a test relying on the uniqueness principle for using evidence from a miscount in inferring a counterfactual cardinal number. All the 5-year-olds passed, as did half the preschoolers. Subtests probed associated number-skills. We suggest that a crucial preschool step is to start conceptualising error by categorising relations between counting and miscounting. That step is taken at a similar age to passing a representational theory of mind test but the two were uncorrelated.

Regulation of division of labour between cognitive systems controlling action

The brain has evolved a division of labour amongst component systems which link different sorts of processing with precise actions. Debate is over centralized versus decentralized control at different processing levels, from cognitive systems to motor-control systems. With simultaneous activation of alternative expert systems which link (a) picture-processing with drawing and (b) reading with writing, decentralized modelling predicted both the averaging of action-production times and additive effects of neural noise. Such modelling has the advantage of being able to measure the cost of regulation both within and between systems, in a common metric of performance variability. That commonality strengthens the trend to regard the brain as a distributed super-system with a great deal of regulation done towards the output end.

Spatial reference systems and the canonicality effect in infant search

Abstract Infants have a bias in search tasks toward reaching centrally in their visual field rather than peripherally. When care is taken to control this, another bias has been found: one toward treating upright cups as more reliable location markers for a hidden object than inverted cups. This has been named the “canonicality effect”. In this study, the two biases are elicited in the same sample of infants. When a transposition design resulted in the hidden object maintaining either a central or a constant peripheral position, infants searched more reliably centrally than peripherally, regardless of the orientation of the cups hiding the object. However, this bias toward centrality did not hold when the position of the hidden object was not held constant in relation to its initial position: when transposition resulted in the object shifting from a central to a peripheral position, or vice versa, the infants shifted search more reliably with upright cups than with inverted ones regardless of the central-peripheral variable. The two biases seem to be alternatives. Infants apparently switch between spatial codes, rather than employing both codes across all conditions. It was found possible to reverse the canonicality effect under predicted conditions in a way which confirms its analysis as a local spatial encoding of the point of search, that is as a relation between object and hiding place.

Why set-comparison is vital in early number learning

Cardinal numbers serve two logically complementary functions. They tell us how many things are within a set, and they tell us whether two sets are equivalent or not. Current modelling of counting focuses on the representation of number sufficient for the within-set function; however, such representations are necessary but not sufficient for the equivalence function. We propose that there needs to be some consideration of how the link between counting and set-comparison is achieved during formative years of numeracy. We work through the implications to identify how this crucial change in numerical understanding occurs.

The allative bias in three-year-olds is almost proof against task naturalness

An allative bias has been noted in childrens comprehension of deictic verbs and directional prepositions. This study investigates the allative bias and its susceptibility to contextual modification. Three-year-olds were asked to act according to requests to move one object to or from another, and to identify where an object had come from or gone to. A reliable bias was found whereby ‘to’ was easier than ‘from’. Attempts to make the utterance more naturally related to the task, by using movement and fronted objects, modulated the bias to a small extent, but did not abolish it. An analysis of directional expressions in terms of the components SOURCE, PATH and GOAL is presented in relation to the task-demands.

What is the Child's Own View in a Spatial Task?: A Spatial by Temporal Interaction Affecting Errors in Perceptual Reports

Children are sometimes called ‘egocentric’ on the basis of their performance on Piagetian spatial-inference tasks. They often inappropriately substitute their own perceptual report for another observers. Little is known about what responses are activated in giving perceptual reports. An experiment is presented which tightly controls spatial and temporal stimulus ordering. One condition elicted reports of that aspect of the display which children could not see instead of what they could see. Explanations are considered on the basis of relational coding and temporal responsiveness.

Educating the design stance: Issues of coherence and transgression

Bullot & Reber (B&R) put forth a design stance to fuse psychological and art historical accounts of visual thinking into a single theory. We argue that this aspect of their proposal needs further fine-tuning. Issues of transgression and coherence are necessary to provide stability to the design stance. We advocate looking to Art Education for such fundamentals of picture understanding.

Gross Failure to Utilise Alignment Cues in Children's Drawing of Three-Dimensional Relationships

There are two major ways of classifying the development of childrens attempts to represent three-dimensional relationships on the page. One is in terms of discrete drawing systems and the other is in terms of local decisions that have to be taken within more than one system. An observation is made which appears paradoxical from each of these approaches. Nonetheless, study of the observation reveals a systematic relationship with a systems approach. But this cannot be explained without extending the assumptions of a systems approach.