Relations between language and symbolic gesture development in early childhood

Language development is thought to be associated with other domains of mental activity that require representational capacity, like symbolic gesture. Study 1 explores associations between multiple measures of language and gesture across the third and fourth years of life. Results indicate stability in language, partial stability in gesture, and concurrent and longitudinal associations between language and gesture. Study 2 further explores language-symbolic gesture relations by measuring more finely which aspects of language relate to the symbolic representation of actions with objects and by exploring associations between symbolic gesture and a performance (nonverbal) measure of general intellectual ability.     

Symbolic play performance and early language development

The object-substitution symbolic play abilities of young children at three early language levels (i.e., MLU Stage Pre I, Early Stage I, and Late Stage I) were compared. In addition, the relationship between early language performance and object-substitution symbolic play was investigated. Results support the view that symbolic play performance is related to early language development, and in particular to the beginnings of combinational language (i.e., early syntax). Children at the combinatorial level of language development demonstrated significantly more representational ability than children at the single-word level.     

A cognitive-psychological perspective on Gillespie's "Lights and lattices": some relations among perception, imagery, and thought

George Gillespie's valuable observations on light and lattice imageries are played in the context of current research and theory on cognitive imagery (Kosslyn, Pylyshyn), ordinary and lucid dreaming, representational geometric imagery in scientific thought, the author's previous writings on altered states of consciousness, and Gibson's views on perception and imagery. Gillespie's reports show categories of imagery deconstruction and abstraction that link these areas and suggest an integrative model of the varieties of symbolic imagery.     

The Primary Process: Freud’s Profound Yet Neglected Contribution to the Psychology of Consciousness

ABSTRACT

The primary process model is part of Freud’s struggle to define and distinguish conscious and unconscious mental activity. He created two embryonic models of unconscious mind. One he derived from studying symptoms of dynamic repression or sequestration of content already capable of symbolic mental representation. The other, the primary process, is his landmark effort to define a mental activity different from reflective representational thought, derived from studying dreaming. He could not clearly separate the repression model, as it is also based on the primary process. He vacillated as to whether the primary process is qualitatively different from representational symbolic thought. His efforts to articulate preconscious mentation suggest an ambiguous gray area between conscious thought and the primary process. Although he concluded that the primary process is unconscious because it is not intrinsically reflective, its manifestations are psychologically conscious and directly evident except in the physiologically unconscious state of dreaming. Similar problems color the efforts of others including Klein, Matte-Blanco, and theorists of attachment and implicit learning to separate conscious and unconscious mind and to articulate a model of mental function different from reflective consciousness. A model of conscious mental activity different from reflective representational consciousness, called primordial consciousness, is proposed to account for a wide spectrum of human phenomena both normal and pathological that share characteristics of immediacy and belief. They include, in addition to dreaming, psychosis, creativity, spirituality, and mental process in non-western cultures.     

Parent-Child Symbolic Pay: Three Theories in Search of an Effect

In symbolic play, children construct increasingly sophisticated representations of the world as well as relations between symbols and their external referents as they advance upon their developing cognitions about people, actions, and objects. Presumably, more sophisticated partners, like parents, promote children′s development in this domain. Yet the empirical literature to date shows little support for the notion that child solitary symbolic play grows through adult-child symbolic play interactions. This paper first reviews empirical studies that address the role and effects of a more sophisticated partner on children′s early symbolic play. Next, the paper presents three theoretical perspectives that support a view that symbolic play and advance children′s representational competencies more broadly; they include attachment, scaffolding, and ethological theory. Finally, the paper revisits the literature on interactive influences on children′s play reconsidering the nature and role of specific independent and dependent variables in studies of the growth of children′s symbolic play.     

The approximate number system is not predictive for symbolic number processing in kindergarteners

The relation between the approximate number system (ANS) and symbolic number processing skills remains unclear. Some theories assume that children acquire the numerical meaning of symbols by mapping them onto the preexisting ANS. Others suggest that in addition to the ANS, children also develop a separate, exact representational system for symbolic number processing. In the current study, we contribute to this debate by investigating whether the nonsymbolic number processing of kindergarteners is predictive for symbolic number processing. Results revealed no association between the accuracy of the kindergarteners on a nonsymbolic number comparison task and their performance on the symbolic comparison task six months later, suggesting that there are two distinct representational systems for the ANS and numerical symbols.     

Mother knows best: Epigenetic inheritance,maternal effects,and the evolution of human intelligence

Contemporary evolution biology has recognized the role of development in evolution. Evolutionarily oriented psychologists have similarly recognized the role that behavioral plasticity, particularly early in development, may have had on the evolution of species, harking back to the ideas of Baldwin (the Baldwin effect). Epigenetic theories of development provide a framework for interpreting the interacting roles of experience and genetics both in ontogeny and phylogeny and the transmission of nongenetic characteristics across generations (epigenetic inheritance). In mammals in particular, differences in maternal behavior may contribute substantially to epigenetic inheritance. Changes in early rearing experiences may have been especially important for humans’ ancestors, leading to the acquisition of symbolic functioning. Such representational changes were most influential in social cognition and led to new selective pressures furthering the evolution of symbolic abilities. Research with great apes is presented to suggest that our last common ancestor with chimpanzees likely had the behavioral plasticity and sociocognitive precursors to modify their behavior and cognition via maternal effects toward a more human-like social intelligence.     

Radicalizing numerical cognition

In recent decades, non-representational approaches to mental phenomena and cognition have been gaining traction in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. In these alternative approach, mental representations either lose their central status or, in its most radical form, are banned completely. While there is growing agreement that non-representational accounts may succeed in explaining some cognitive capacities (e.g. perception), there is widespread skepticism about the possibility of giving non-representational accounts of cognitive capacities such as memory, imagination or abstract thought. In this paper, I will critically examine the view that there are fundamental limitations to non-representational explanations of cognition. Rather than challenging these arguments on general grounds, I will examine a set of human cognitive capacities that are generally thought to fall outside the scope of non-representational accounts, i.e. numerical cognition. After criticizing standard representational accounts of numerical cognition for their lack of explanatory power, I will argue that a non-representational approach that is inspired by radical enactivism offers the best hope for developing a genuine naturalistic explanatory account for these cognitive capacities.

     

Phantasies, Neurotic-Beliefs, and Beliefs-Proper

This paper presents a philosophical analysis of three cognitive states familiar and important to psychoanalysts—phantasy, neurotic-belief, and belief-proper. It explores the differences among these three propositional attitudes and finds that the development of secondary process capacities of reality testing and truth directness out of earlier primary process operations (themselves prior to considerations of truth or falsity) plays a crucial role. Difficulties in the proper typing of cognitive states are discussed, as are the consequences of such confounds. This use of a philosophical method serves to sharpen the familiar psychoanalytic clinical concepts of phantasy and neurotic-belief. In addition, these same clinical concepts, once properly specified, have much to offer the philosophy of mind, where current understanding of representational cognitive states is restricted to those that are largely conscious and rational. When psychoanalytic concepts such as phantasy and neurotic-belief can be better integrated within the discipline of philosophy of mind, both philosophers and psychoanalysts will have a more complete and adequate theory of mind.     

The development of representational play in chimpanzees and bonobos: Evolutionary implications,pretense, and the role of interspecies communication

This research investigates the development of symbolic or representational play in two species of the genus Pan, bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). The participants varied not only by species, but also as to whether they had become proficient in communicating with humans via a set of arbitrary visual symbols, called lexigrams. Using a developmental sequence of representational play based on McCune, we found every level that children manifest to be constructed by Pan. The most robust and regular ontogenetic sequence for both bonobos and chimpanzee was not McCune's five-level progression, but a three-step ontogenetic sequence: Level 1 (no representation, no pretense) precedes Levels 2–4 (representation but no pretense), which in turn precedes Level 5 (includes pretense as well as representation). A linguistic system for interspecies communication was necessary for Level 5 representational play and “true” pretense. Human scaffolding produced developmental progress within sequences for all the apes, except the bonobo who lacked a system of interspecies communication. This evidence suggests that the potential for representational play and its social stimulation were present in the common ancestor of bonobos, chimpanzees and humans five million years ago.     

Archetypes Reconsidered as Emergent Outcomes of Cognitive Complexity and Evolved Motivational Systems

Advances in contemporary cognitive science suggest that our internal representational systems are powerfully shaped by interacting evolutionary, developmental, and neuro-computational processes. Although Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious are largely dismissed by modern psychological science, something very much like them emerges from the intersection of these perspectives. Functional analysis suggests that a variety of conserved systems—basic biological ones, like self-protection and mating, as well as more complex social ones, like cheater-detection—need to make use of more general representational systems (like face perception) to simulate and predict adaptive responses to recurring environmental problems. Furthermore, analogous to the capacity to develop language, these systems depend on specific input at critical developmental stages. Archetypes reflect the interaction of domain-specific challenges and domain-general simulations. They are dynamic patterns of perception, memory, and action, resonating with ancient motivational and emotional systems. They shed light on how the symbolic emerges from the subsymbolic. Archetypes are thus the natural consequence of our fundamental social goals playing out in three nested dynamics: the online representation of reality by mental simulation systems, the history of personal experiences that build a particular instantiation of these systems, and the evolutionary dynamics that selected the web of cognitive and affective capacities that all normally developing humans share. This modern elaboration of the idea of archetypes fuses disparate conceptual perspectives, provokes methodological reorientations, generates novel hypotheses, and will likely open whole new lines of integrative inquiry.     

Putting Thoughts to Work: Concepts,Systematicity, and Stimulus‐Independence*

I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible traditions for thinking about concepts. On the one hand, many cognitive scientists assume that the systematic redeployment of representational abilities suffices for having concepts. On the other hand, a long philosophical tradition maintains that language is necessary for genuinely conceptual thought. I argue that on a theoretically useful and empirically plausible concept of ‘concept’, it is necessary and sufficient for conceptual thought that a thinker be able to entertain many of the potential thoughts produced by recombining her representational abilities apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being represented. Such representational abilities support a cognitive engagement with the world that is flexible, abstract, and active.     

Semantics,experience and time

The computational hypothesis, with its inherent representationalism, and the dynamical hypothesis, with its apparent absence of representations and its commitment to continuous time, stand at an impasse. It is unclear how the dynamical stance can handle representational thought, or how computationalism can deal effectively with a tightly coupled, reciprocally causative agent–environment system in continuous transformation. Underlying this dilemma is the complex relation of mind to time, a relation encoded in the word experience. We must ask if any hypothesis describes a ‘device’ capable of experience? Yet what is an intelligence and its thought without experience? Is a computational device, whether supporting a symbolic processor or connectionist net, intrinsically condemned to a zero degree of experience? What is required of a dynamical device? It is argued here that ‘semantic’ intelligence and thought rests upon experience, fundamentally upon the invariance laws defined over time within conscious perception. The structure of experience is intrinsically unavailable to the computational device, limiting it to a ‘syntactic’ intelligence. An alternative conception of a device is offered, based on Bergson conjoined with Gibson, which supports the qualitative and structural aspects of experience and the semantic. It frames a dynamical model of perception and memory in which invariance laws are intrinsic, creates a deeper notion of situatedness, and supports a concept of semantically based, representative thought founded upon perception.     

Parental capacities for triadic relationships during pregnancy: Early predictors of children's behavioral and representational functioning at preschool age

This study examines associations between parental capacities for triadic (mother–father–child) relationships, assessed prenatally, and the representational and behavioral functioning of their offspring at preschool age. Thirty‐eight parental couples were given an intensive psychodynamic interview during their first pregnancy to assess how they anticipated their future parenthood and their relationships as threesomes (mother–father–child). The capacity for triadic relationships (“triadic capacity”) was defined as the capacity of fathers and mothers to anticipate their family relationships without excluding either themselves or their partners from the relationship with the infant. Four years later, the representational and behavioral functioning of their children were assessed in depth using child narrative interviews and parental behavior ratings. The coherence of the children's narratives and the number of positive themes they expressed were significantly negatively correlated with the number of behavioral problems. In the longitudinal analyses, there were significant positive correlations between the parental triadic capacities and the coherence/number of positive themes in the children's narratives whereas parental triadic capacities showed a significant negative correlation with the number of the children's externalizing problems. The significance of triadic relational family processes for the development of children's representational world and behavioral functioning is discussed. ©2005 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Extended cognition and fixed properties: steps to a third-wave version of extended cognition

This paper explores several paths a distinctive third wave of extended cognition might take. In so doing, I address a couple of shortcomings of first- and second-wave extended cognition associated with a tendency to conceive of the properties of internal and external processes as fixed and non-interchangeable. First, in the domain of cognitive transformation, I argue that a problematic tendency of the complementarity model is that it presupposes that socio-cultural resources augment but do not significantly transform the brain??s representational capacities during diachronic development. In this paper I show that there is available a much more dynamical explanation??one taking the processes of the brain??s enculturation into patterned practices as transforming the brain??s representational capacities. Second, in the domain of cognitive assembly, I argue that another problematic tendency is an individualistic notion of cognitive agency, since it overlooks the active contribution of socio-cultural practices in the assembly process of extended cognitive systems. In contrast to an individualistic notion of cognitive agency, I explore the idea that it is possible to decentralize cognitive agency to include socio-cultural practices.     

Developmental Changes in Early Comprehension and Production of Drawings: Evidence From Two Socioeconomic Backgrounds

Two studies examined young children's comprehension and production of representational drawings across and within 2 socioeconomic strata (SES). Participants were 130 middle-SES (MSES) and low-SES (LSES) Argentine children, from 30 to 60 months old, given a task with 2 phases, production and comprehension. The production phase assessed free drawing and drawings from simple 3-dimensional objects (model drawing); the comprehension phase assessed children's understanding of an adult's line drawings of the objects. MSES children solved the comprehension phase of the task within the studied age range; representational production emerged first in model drawing (42 months) and later in free drawing (48 months). The same developmental pathway was observed in LSES children but with a clear asynchrony in the age of onset of comprehension and production: Children understood the symbolic nature of drawings at 42 months old and the first representational drawings were found at 60 months old. These results provide empirical evidence that support the crucial influence of social experiences by organizing and constraining graphic development.     

Historical change, cultural learning, and cognitive representation in Zinacantec Maya children

Against the background of an unchanging sequence of representational development, we demonstrate that implicit processes of learning and cognition can change from one historical period to another. One generation of Zinacantec Maya children was studied in 1969 and 1970, the next generation in 1991 and 1993. In the intervening two decades, the community, located in Chiapas, Mexico, was involved in a transition from an economy based primarily on subsistence and agriculture to an economy based primarily on money and commerce. A naturalistic study of weaving apprenticeship and an experimental study of visual representation showed that the ecological transition was linked to greater emphasis on independent cultural learning, abstract representation, and innovation, and, correlatively, a movement away from scaffolded guidance, detail-oriented representation, and imitative representational strategies. These changes constituted automatic adaptations with an implicit nature. In addition, historical variability in implicit modes of cultural apprenticeship predicted shifts in implicit processes of child and adolescent cognition. In sum, socialization and development are not fixed but adapt, in a coordinated way, to changing ecological conditions.     

The emergence of representation in search: Understanding the hider as an independent agent

Corrigan's results point the way toward a reconceptualization of how the development of representation affects search. The child does not cognitively recreate the invisible displacements of the object. Instead she seems to understand that the hider is an independent agent who can use simple hiding strategies that the child does not directly perceive. This representational skill for search, we propose, is one realization of a general representational capacity that emerges late in the second year. The general capacity is defined structurally as the ability to coordinate two sensorimotor systems into a single skill. Although there seem to be some discontinuities in the emergence of the representational capacity, its development is mostly gradual and continuous.     

Can infants use video to update mental representations of absent objects?

Before their second birthday, infants can update their knowledge based on what someone tells them, but can they do so based on what a video shows them? The current study explored whether infants can update their representation of an absent object’s properties after seeing a video of something happening to it, following seminal work showing that they can update their representation after being told about something happening to it (Ganea et al., 2007). It thus adapted an existing paradigm for testing infants’ understanding of references to absent objects (using language) to investigate a different symbolic medium (video). Twenty-two-month-olds first played with a toy and later saw on video that the toy underwent a change in state while they were out of the room. Infants in the current study did not subsequently identify the toy based on this new information, whereas those in previous research did. Infants this age thus appear less likely to update their representation of an absent object’s properties using video than using language. This result is consistent with the possibility that infants may understand the representational function of symbolic objects later in development than they understand the representational function of language. It also aligns with evidence of the video deficit in which infants learn less effectively from video than from firsthand experience.     

Psycholinguistics and education: Directions and divergences

The development of reading, foreign language competence, rhetorical and communicative skills, and symbolic thought processes differs from pure psycholinguistic research as horticulture differs from botany. Correspondences between educational psycholinguistics and pure psycholinguistics lie in how each views the learner on a continuum that ranges from docile to autonomous. Language can be characterized as arbitrary or derived from possible universal symbolizing processes, and curriculum in general can be characterized on a continuum ranging from opaque to emergent. Language acquisition can be viewed as the product of intentional socialization or an outgrowth of natural processes, and educators may be said to range from instructive to eductive in their approach to methods. The divergences between education and psycholinguistics in respect to their philosophical analysis of their research strategies and their views about individual variation and central tendencies seem to presage mutually supportive research programs.