The use of event‐related potentials in the study of early cognitive development

The article by Guillaume Thierry is a welcome one, alerting the field to the exciting ways in which event‐related potentials (ERPs) can be used to study cognitive development. It is also timely: there is great interest in the brain sciences, and in how neuroscience can be applied to cognitive development and indeed to education. In my view, however, the article is perhaps too cautious. It does not seem necessary to delay the use of ERPs in cognitive work until all in the field have agreed on the sound characterization of ERP components. It should be possible for further characterization to proceed hand‐in‐hand with data gathering on applied questions. In fact, as partly noted by Thierry, in the auditory domain well‐characterized ERP components are already available, even for infants (e.g. Cheour et al., 1997; Leppänen and Lyytinen, 1997). Furthermore, it is of developmental interest to study older children as well as infants. If ERPs are seen as a tool to complement existing behavioural investigations, rather than as a stand‐alone method to be used independently, then auditory ERPs can certainly be used in current cognitive‐developmental work. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity

The existence and diversity of human cultures are made possible by our species-specific cognitive capacities. But how? Do cultures emerge and diverge as a result of the deployment, over generations and in different populations, of general abilities to learn, imitate and communicate? What role if any do domain-specific evolved cognitive abilities play in the emergence and evolution of cultures? These questions have been approached from different vantage points in different disciplines. Here we present a view that is currently developing out of the converging work of developmental psychologists, evolutionary psychologists and cognitive anthropologists.     

Attention trajectories, mechanisms and outcomes: at the interface between developing cognition and environment

Attentional processes play a crucial role in prioritizing information for further processing and they therefore sit at the interface between internal goals and the challenges presented by the environment. How does attentional control interact with the changing constraints imposed by the developing cognitive system? Emerging work in this area has employed a range of complementary techniques, from increasingly refined neurocognitive measures in typically developing individuals, to the investigation of risk or protective factors influencing attention trajectories in developmental disorders. A growing corpus of data suggests that, while attentional biases for specific input characteristics (e.g. suddenly appearing stimuli, emotional expressions) are in place from infancy, it is the interplay between these predispositions, genetic and environmental factors that drives attention development over time. With the advent of multidisciplinary approaches to the developmental cognitive neuroscience of attention, unravelling these complex dynamics from infancy and their outcome on learning is increasingly within reach.     

The developmental trajectory of children's auditory and visual statistical learning abilities: modality‐based differences in the effect of age

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks and across modalities (e.g., auditory, visual), raising questions on the domain generality of SL. However, while SL is well established for infants and adults, only little is known about its developmental trajectory during childhood, leaving two important questions unanswered: (1) Is SL an early‐maturing capacity that is fully developed in infancy, or does it improve with age like other cognitive capacities (e.g., memory)? and (2) Will SL have similar developmental trajectories across modalities? Only few studies have looked at SL across development, with conflicting results: some find age‐related improvements while others do not. Importantly, no study to date has examined auditory SL across childhood, nor compared it to visual SL to see if there are modality‐based differences in the developmental trajectory of SL abilities. We addressed these issues by conducting a large‐scale study of children's performance on matching auditory and visual SL tasks across a wide age range (5–12y). Results show modality‐based differences in the development of SL abilities: while children's learning in the visual domain improved with age, learning in the auditory domain did not change in the tested age range. We examine these findings in light of previous studies and discuss their implications for modality‐based differences in SL and for the role of auditory SL in language acquisition. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kg35hoF0pw .     

The emerging self: the convergence of mind,personality and thinking styles

This paper aims to integrate research and theorizing about problem solving, self and personality into a comprehensive theory. With this purpose, the paper attempts to answer three questions: how do humans become aware of themselves and how do the products of self-awareness interrelate to produce an integrated self-system, which includes the domains of cognition and personality? How do persons know and influence each other? How do these processes change with development? The answers given to these questions by self, personality and cognitive developmental psychology are critically examined. It is concluded that an overarching model would have to assume a multilevel and multidimensional architecture. This would involve three main levels: the first includes general-purpose processes and functions, such as processing efficiency and working memory, which define current cognitive potentials; the second includes several domain-specific systems directed to different aspects of the environment; the third includes self-oriented processes that register, represent and regulate processes at the other two levels. Each person’s self-concepts result from the application of the third level on the other two and they differentially reflect their condition. Personality reflects the interaction between these self-concepts and dispositions to act in particular ways. Because humans share this architecture they can negotiate and affect each other’s self- and reflected representations. Thus, the formation of mind, self and personality results from a continuous flow of interactions between the levels and domains of mind within and across persons. The article summarizes a series of studies lending support to this general model.     

Cognitive Sciences Research: More Than Thinking About Drug Abuse

On May 23, 1997, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Psychological Society co-sponsored a conference titled "Cognitive Sciences Research: More Than Thinking About Drug Abuse." The conference highlighted important lines of research, both within and outside of drug abuse, that may elucidate the relationships between substance abuse and cognitive processes. This Special Section of Psychological Science presents a compilation of articles from that conference by scientists who are working in the forefront of this exciting new research area. The research questions posed by these articles take the following forms: What are the cognitive and developmental effects (i.e., the consequences) of substance abuse? What are the antecedents or precursors of drug use that render persons vulnerable to taking drugs? How do the effects of drugs, in turn, become antecedents for changes in perception, behavior, and cognition that further enhance vulnerability to drugs?     

The Cornell Institute for Research on Children: A vision of integrated developmental science

The Cornell Institute for Research on Children (CIRC) is an intellectual infrastructure funded by the National Science Foundation under the aegis of the Children's Research Initiative, which was spearheaded by Rodney R. Cocking. Cocking's vision of integrated developmental science is an integral part of CIRC's philosophy. CIRC aims to integrate knowledge and paradigms from a variety of fields (e.g., developmental psychology, economics, neuroscience, and pediatrics), which take different perspectives on similar issues (e.g., the effects of toxins on cognitive development), making it explicitly interdisciplinary. The object of CIRC studies is to apply research findings to social policy. To accomplish this, CIRC provides resources to enable teams of scholars from diverse fields to collaborate on policy-relevant questions. CIRC's approach begins by asking policy-makers to define questions for researchers to address, then shepherds the process by which scholars from various relevant disciplines are commissioned to work as a team to answer such questions. To demonstrate the strengths of this approach we describe the six components that comprise CIRC and provide an actual example of a project that CIRC has commissioned as well as a hypothetical example of a project that CIRC could undertake. This article is a progress report, written in an effort to disseminate information about CIRC's agenda.     

The developmental cognitive neuroscience of functional connectivity

Developmental cognitive neuroscience is a rapidly growing field that examines the relationships between biological development and cognitive ability. In the past decade, there has been ongoing refinement of concepts and methodology related to the study of ‘functional connectivity’ among distributed brain regions believed to underlie cognition and behavioral control. Due to the recent availability of relatively easy-to-use tools for functional connectivity analysis, there has been a sharp upsurge of studies that seek to characterize normal and psychopathologically abnormal brain functional integration. However, relatively few studies have applied functional and effective connectivity analysis techniques to developmental cognitive neuroscience. Functional and effective connectivity analysis methods are ideally suited to advance our understanding of the neural substrates of cognitive development, particularly in understanding how and why changes in the functional ‘wiring’ of neural networks promotes optimal cognitive control throughout development. The purpose of this review is to summarize the central concepts, methods, and findings of functional integration neuroimaging research to discuss key questions in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. These ideas will be presented within a context that merges relevant concepts and proposals from different developmental theorists. The review will outline a few general predictions about likely relationships between typical ‘executive’ cognitive maturation and changes in brain network functional integration during adolescence. Although not exhaustive, this conceptual review also will showcase some of recent findings that have emerged to support these predictions.     

Merging familiar and new senses to perceive and act in space

Our experience of the world seems to unfold seamlessly in a unitary 3D space. For this to be possible, the brain has to merge many disparate cognitive representations and sensory inputs. How does it do so? I discuss work on two key combination problems: coordinating multiple frames of reference (e.g. egocentric and allocentric), and coordinating multiple sensory signals (e.g. visual and proprioceptive). I focus on two populations whose spatial processing we can observe at a crucial stage of being configured and optimised: children, whose spatial abilities are still developing significantly, and naïve adults learning new spatial skills, such as sensing distance using auditory cues. The work uses a model-based approach to compare participants’ behaviour with the predictions of alternative information processing models. This lets us see when and how—during development, and with experience—the perceptual-cognitive computations underpinning our experiences in space change. I discuss progress on understanding the limits of effective spatial computation for perception and action, and how lessons from the developing spatial cognitive system can inform approaches to augmenting human abilities with new sensory signals provided by technology.

     

Analyse de l'activité et mouvements dialogiques dans le cadre de l'instruction au sosie

In this paper, the author is interested in two questions: how to impulse the analysis of the activity in a developmental way for the subjects involved? Which scientific knowledge is useful to explain and understand such a process? Based on Vygotski's work, for whom thought undergoes many changes as it turns into speech, we will first suggest to transform the point of view on “what is difficult to say” for the subjects in work analysis to consider it as resources for the analysis. In the continuity of Vygotski's work, we try to understand what constitutes the heart of this development process, in particular the nature of the changes between internal and external language. We will then present the method called “instructions to the double” as it is taken up in our research team “Clinique de l'Activité”. Finally, analyzing a piece of instructions to the double realized by an employee in a group of social workers dedicated to professional integration, we will identify the dialogical movements present in the analysis process. Bakhtin becomes then an essential reference to understand the migrations of the thought.     

Neglected questions in job design: How people design jobs,task-job predictability,and influence of training

Three questions important to job design interventions but neglected in research were explored. First, how do people design jobs? Internal processes (e.g., growth needs) from psychological (or job enrichment) models of job design were not apparent. Instead, groupings of tasks into jobs suggested simple cognitive categorization based on task similarity, reflecting an engineering (or work simplification) orientation. Second, can job design be predicted from task design? Separate measures for job and task designs were unrelated, indicating that the whole is not predictable from the parts in job design, Third, can job design principles be trained? Subjects easily learned and applied different job design approaches.     

Correlated change of Big Five personality traits across the lifespan: A search for determinants

Correlated change between different personality traits has recently caught the attention of researchers studying personality development. We conducted two studies to examine age effects (Study 1) and effects of cognitive ability (Study 2) on this phenomenon. Results indicated that correlated change was relatively stable from adolescence through adulthood, and then increased after age 70. Second, correlated change was greater among traits that have been linked to the same developmental processes (e.g., social investment or maturation of specific neurological systems). Third, cognitive ability was negatively associated with correlated change. Collectively, our findings suggest that personality change is partly driven by broad mechanisms affecting multiple traits. Associations with age and cognitive ability provide important leads regarding the possible nature of these mechanisms.     

The "Humpty Dumpty Problem" in the Study of Early Cognitive Development: Putting the Infant Back Together Again

ABSTRACT— In this article, I propose that the big question for the field of infant cognitive development is best characterized as the "Humpty Dumpty problem": Now that we have studied cognitive abilities in isolation, how do we put the developing cognitive system (and the infant) back together again? This problem is significant because cognitive abilities do not occur in isolation. Infants remember the items they have attended to and perceived, and their emotional state will influence their perception and representation of the events they encounter. Moreover, by examining the development of the whole cognitive system, or the whole child, we gain a deeper understanding of mechanisms developmental change. Thus, the big question for the study of infant cognition is like the question confronting all the king's horses and all the king's men: How do we put the infant's cognitive system back together again?     

Integration of social identities in the self: toward a cognitive-developmental model.

This article presents a model of social identity development and integration in the self. Classic intergroup theories (e.g., social identity theory, self-categorization theory) address the situational, short-term changes in social identities. Although these theories identify the contextual and environmental factors that explain situational changes in social identification, the intraindividual processes underlying developmental changes in social identities and their integration within the self remain to be identified. Relying on recent intergroup models as well as on developmental (i.e., neo-Piagetian) and social cognitive frameworks, this article proposes a four-stage model that explains the specific processes by which multiple social identities develop intraindividually and become integrated within the self over time. The factors that facilitate versus impede these identity change processes and the consequences associated with social identity integration are also presented.     

Is the child ‘father of the Man’? Evaluating the stability of genetic influences across development

This selective review considers findings in genetic research that have shed light on how genes operate across development. We will address the question of whether the child is ‘father of the Man’ from a genetic perspective. In other words, do the same genetic influences affect the same traits across development? Using a ‘taster menu’ approach and prioritizing newer findings on cognitive and behavioral traits, examples from the following genetic disciplines will be discussed: (a) developmental quantitative genetics (such as longitudinal twin studies), (b) neurodevelopmental genetic syndromes with known genetic causes (such as Williams syndrome), (c) developmental candidate gene studies (such as those that link infant and adult populations), (d) developmental genome‐wide association studies (GWAS), and (e) DNA resequencing. Evidence presented here suggests that there is considerable genetic stability of cognitive and behavioral traits across development, but there is also evidence for genetic change. Quantitative genetic studies have a long history of assessing genetic continuity and change across development. It is now time for the newer, more technology‐enabled fields such as GWAS and DNA resequencing also to take on board the dynamic nature of human behavior.     

The balance beam in the balance: reflections on rules, relational complexity, and developmental processes

The lead articles by Jansen and van der Maas (2002, this issue) and Halford, Andrews, Dalton, Boag, and Zielinski (2002, this issue) raise numerous questions concerning the development of rule use and how best to assess it. In this Reflection, we focus on the following: (a) When can one infer the use of a rule? (b) What are the mechanisms underlying the development of rule use? and (c) What is the relation between understanding and execution? In addressing these questions, we contrast relational complexity theory with cognitive complexity and control (CCC) theory.     

Developing Together: Parents Meeting Children��s Developmental Imperatives

It is well known that the parent influences the child, but few realize how much the child changes the adult. This paper reports research that explored how adults change when they learn to nurture their child??s developmental needs. It also explores how empathy with the child impacts an adult??s ability to move through his or her own unresolved childhood issues into new meaning and relationships. Using qualitative methods and quantitative measures, the research captures perspectives of 20 parents about their own development from using child development principles. Analysis resulted in the identification of five themes: (a) cognitive development in perspective, differentiation from past ways, and new meaning-making; (b) emotional development of trust, empathy, and affective complexity; (c) personal agency of intentional effort and use of critical self-inquiry; (d) adult well-being; and (e) emergence of wisdom. More research is needed to determine the association between child development competence and adult development.     

All together now: when dissociations between knowledge and action disappear

Why do people sometimes seem to know things but fail to act appropriately on the basis of this knowledge? Such dissociations between knowledge and action often occur in infants and children, and in adults following brain damage. These dissociations have supported inferences about the organization of cognitive processes (e.g., separable knowledge and action systems) and their development (e.g., knowledge systems develop before action systems). The current study tested the basis for knowledge-action dissociations in a card-sorting task in which children typically correctly answer questions about sorting rules while sorting cards incorrectly. When questions and sorting measures were more closely equated for the amount of conflict that needed to be resolved for a correct response, children showed no systematic dissociation between knowledge and action. The results challenge standard interpretations of knowledge-action dissociations and support an alternative account based on graded knowledge representations.     

Developmental stages,Piagetian stages in particular: A critical review

Developmental stages in general and Piaget's stages in particular have given rise to considerable controversy. Much of this controversy revolves around the responses that have been given to the following five central questions: (1) Do developmental stages exist? (2) If they exist, where are they? (3) What features define a developmental sequence as a sequence of developmental stages? (4) What psychological processes underlie developmental change? (5) Should we abandon the concept of developmental stages? The main goal of this paper is to present a critical review of such responses, while arguing for a strong conception of development and a “non-received” view of Piaget's theory. After an introduction section, we elaborate on each of the five questions. Finally, we present several reasons why this paper often appeals to Piaget's theory, and why his theory has been greatly misunderstood.