Action,the foundation for cognitive development

It is argued that action constitutes the foundation for cognitive development. Action is a principal component of all aspects of cognitive development including social understanding. It reflects the motives of the child, the problems to be solved, the goals to be attained, and the constraints and possibilities of the child’s body and sensory‐motor system. Actions are directed into the future and their control is based on knowledge of what is going to happen next. The child’s sensory‐motor system is especially designed to facilitate the extraction of this knowledge. In addition, the infant is endowed with motives that ensure that these innate predispositions are transformed into a system of knowledge for guiding actions. By acting on the world, infants develop their cognition.     

X—Knowledge of Action Without Observation

This paper argues that perception of one's body 'from the inside' provides one with an awareness of acting, and that this awareness explains a previously overlooked feature of one's knowledge of one's own actions. Actions are events: they occur during periods of time. Knowledge of such events must be sensitive to their course through time. Perception of one's body 'from the inside' allows one to monitor one's actions as they unfold, thereby sustaining one's knowledge of what one is doing over the period of time in which one is doing it.     

The Knowledge of Child Development Inventory

The need for an instrument that measures knowledge of child development and is comprehensible to lay populations and young adolescents has led to the development of the Knowledge of Child Development Inventory (KCDI). The KCDI is a 56-item multiple-choice test of knowledge of child development from birth to age three in the areas of emotional, cognitive, physical, and social development. Normative data were obtained on the KCDI from a sample population of 434 adolescent and adult females from varying racial backgrounds. The instrument has a reading level of 8.0 (Fry Reading Index), a minimum of technical terminology, reliability of .93 (Cronback's alpha coefficient of internal consistency), and criterion validity of .83. The KCDI would be relevant in educational settings where pre- and post-assessment of knowledge of child development is desired, i.e., high school courses in child development, prenatal classes, Head Start parent-training programs, and early childhood/special education parent-training programs. In addition, the KCDI would be relevant in clinical settings where the assessment of a person's concepts of child development are of importance i.e., adoption agencies, abuse centers, and teenage pregnancy centers.     

The developmental origins of cognitive vulnerability to depression: temperament, parenting, and negative life events in childhood as contributors to negative cognitive style

Cognitive models of depression have been well supported with adults, but the developmental origins of cognitive vulnerability are not well understood. The authors hypothesized that temperament, parenting, and negative life events in childhood would contribute to the development of cognitive style, with withdrawal negativity and negative parental feedback moderating the effects of negative life events to predict more depressogenic cognitive styles. These constructs were assessed in 289 children and their parents followed longitudinally from infancy to 5th grade; a subsample (n = 120) also participated in a behavioral task in which maternal feedback to child failure was observed. Results indicated that greater withdrawal negativity in interaction with negative life events was associated with more negative cognitive styles. Self-reported maternal anger expression and observed negative maternal feedback to child's failure significantly interacted with child's negative events to predict greater cognitive vulnerability. There was little evidence of paternal parenting predicting child negative cognitive style.     

An action perspective on motor development

Motor development has all too often been considered as a set of milestones with little significance for the psychology of the child. Nothing could be more wrong. From an action perspective, motor development is at the heart of development and reflects all its different aspects, including perception, planning and motivation. Recent converging evidence demonstrates that, from birth onwards, children are agents who act on the world. Even in the newborn child, their movements are never just reflexes. On the contrary, they are purposeful goal-directed actions that foresee events in the world. Thus, motor development is not just a question of gaining control over muscles; equally important are questions such as why a particular movement is made, how the movements are planned, and how they anticipate what is going to happen next.     

Exploring the coherence of young children's explanatory abilities: Evidence from generating counterfactuals

Researchers who advocate the hypothesis that cognitive development is akin to theory formation have also suggested that young children possess distinct systems for explaining physical, psychological, and biological principles (see, e.g., Wellman & Gelman, 1992). One way this has been investigated is by examining how children explain human action: Children explain intentional and accidental actions by appealing to psychological principles, and explain impossible physical or biological action in terms of the underlying principles of those domains (Schult & Wellman, 1997). The current investigation examined the coherence of children's explanatory systems by eliciting explanations of possible and impossible physical, psychological, and biological events. Then, in a separate set of stories, children were asked to generate counterfactual alternatives for characters who wanted to perform an event, but did not, either because of a mishap or because the event was impossible. Overall, children were better at generating explanations for why events were impossible than recognizing that no alternative could be generated for impossible events. However, there was some evidence that children's explanatory abilities predicted whether they could correctly reject cases where no counterfactual alternative could be generated. The results lend support to the hypothesis that children's causal knowledge is coherently organized in domain‐specific knowledge structures.     

Why do we do what we do? The Attention–Readiness–Motivation framework

According to many theories of motivation, the principal driver of human behavior is the affectively driven valuation of actions. Actions are valued by maximizing the difference between stimulus value (the benefits and costs inherent in the stimulus outcome that is the expected result of a given action) and action costs (the effort required to perform that action). However, such accounts have difficulty explaining why individuals act inconsistently in what appear to be comparable situations and often act in ways that seem inconsistent with relevant action values. In particular, we highlight several seemingly anomalous default effects which cannot be explained via traditional valuation‐based factors. In this article, we present the Attention–Readiness–Motivation framework, according to which such behavioral anomalies occur because stimulus value and action costs are respectively influenced by endogenous attention and action readiness—cognitive variables that are typically not considered as a part of the valuation calculus.     

Cognitive neuroscience of actions: a whole is greater than the sum of its parts

The purpose of the present issue of Brain and Cognition is to demonstrate that the strength of neuroscience is in its multidisciplinary approach to understand events. Here we are concerned with the domain of action recognition and production. Seven articles have been selected as representative studies of actions carried out in different areas of neuroscience such as neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and cognitive science. Although each addresses different questions within the field, the articles share a common neuroscientific knowledge, as can be readily gathered from the references cited in each article.     

Acting for reasons, apt action, and knowledge

I argue for the view that there are important similarities between knowledge and acting for a normative reason. I interpret acting for a normative reason in terms of Sosa’s notion of an apt performance. Actions that are done for a normative reason are normatively apt actions. They are in accordance with a normative reason because of a competence to act in accordance with normative reasons. I argue that, if Sosa’s account of knowledge as apt belief is correct, this means that acting for a normative reason is in many respects similar to knowledge. In order to strengthen Sosa’s account of knowledge, I propose to supplement it with an appeal to sub-competences. This clarifies how this account can deal with certain Gettier cases, and it helps to understand how exactly acting for a normative reason is similar to apt belief.     

核心知识系统及其对相关研究的启示

核心知识系统出现于人类个体发展和种系发展的早期,在人类复杂认知能力的发生发展中起着建构模块的作用。该文以表征物体和数量关系的两类核心知识系统的性质及二者在儿童的“数”概念形成和成人的数学思维中所起的作用为例,综述了以灵长类动物、婴儿、儿童和成人为被试的研究证据,并进而提出了核心知识系统给相关研究带来的若干启示。     

A Comparison of Parent Judgments and Child Feelings concerning the Self Adjustment and Social Adjustment of Twelve-Year-Old Children

The purpose of this study was to consider the role of remembering in the development of the ability to plan and carry out sequences of dependent actions. A task calling for sequencing of choices was administered to 46 four-year-olds, 30 seven-year-olds, and 30 10-year-olds. Each child participated in both a remembering (control) condition and a facilitation-of-remembering condition. Performance was better in the facilitation-of-remembering condition than in the remembering (control) condition, but only for four-year-olds (p < .01), indicating that the failure to remember alternatives, rather than a lack of other cognitive abilities, may be a major obstacle in preschoolers' development of planning abilities. An apparent regression in performance of seven-year-olds (p < .01) is interpreted as an inappropriate application of transitional operative understanding of dependent events to situations involving only chance sequences.     

Recensement des actions évaluées à destination des enfants exposés à la violence conjugale

Knowledge relating to actions for children exposed to marital violence appears still limited, whereas in France many efforts are deployed to develop them. This field of intervention is recent and the actors of child welfare and those of the associative sector wishing to set up specific actions to help the child, often encounter a lack of knowledge about this type of intervention. This article proposes to make known actions carried out in this context over Atlantic by the analysis of six programs and the results of their evaluation.     

The effects of prenatal maternal stress on children's cognitive development: Project Ice Storm

There exists considerable research on the effects of prenatal maternal stress on offspring. Animal studies, using random assignment to experimental and control groups, demonstrate the noxious effects of prenatal maternal stress on physical, behavioural and cognitive development. The generalizability of these results to humans is problematic given that cognitive attributions moderate reactions to stressors. In humans, researchers have relied upon maternal anxiety or exposure to life events as proxies for the stressors used with animals. Yet, the associations between maternal anxiety or potentially non-independent life events and problems in infants are confounded by genetic transmission of temperament from mother to child. We summarize the literature on prenatal maternal stress and infant cognitive development, leading to the conclusion that the human literature lacks the ability to separate the effects of the objective exposure to a stressor and the mother's subjective reaction. We then describe our prospective Project Ice Storm in which we are following 150 children who were exposed in utero to a natural disaster. We demonstrate significant effects of the objective severity of exposure on cognitive and language development at age two years with important moderating effects of the timing during pregnancy. The implications of our findings are discussed.     

Perceived punishment and reward values of supervisor actions

The study investigated employee perceptions about the reward or punishment values inherent in a variety of supervisor actions. Actions viewed as most rewarding were generally actions that possessed (a) public visibility, (b) tangibility, (c) implied esteem, and (d) long-term implications. Actions viewed as punishing or aversive involved similar characteristics. Visibility appeared to be most strongly related to perceived severity. In contrast with suggestions in the literature (cf. León, 1981), substantial levels of agreement among raters were found for aversive as well as rewarding actions. Also reviewed are characteristics of leader actions that received mixed ratings from respondents.     

Developmental differences in cognitive diatheses for child depression

We studied developmental changes in the relation between cognitive style (i.e., attributional style and cognitive errors) and depression in children. Subjects included 409 fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade school children. We hypothesized (1) that evidence congruent with a cognitive diathesis model of depression would emerge with development across middle childhood, (2) that Event × Cognitive Style × Age interactions would be specific to some domains of stressful events but not others, and (3) that interactions would be especially prominent in domains that children regarded as personally important. Hierarchical multiple regressions indicated that cognitive style moderated the relation between events and self-reported depressive symptoms only in later childhood, and that such interactions were specific to certain domains of stressful events and cognitions. The importance of distinguishing among types of stress and cognitions in future tests of diathesis-stress models of childhood depression are discussed. Implications of developmental differences in the psychopathology of child depression also emerge.     

Implementation of experimental procedures in the PACER system of on-line control

PACER comprises an Executive and associated routines that together provide the run-time facilities commonly needed by experiment control programs. Although the implementation is specific to a particular PDP-11 installation, the nature of the support provided is of more general interest. Simple experimental procedures are straightforwardly handled by direct program control of timing and of external apparatus, and by direct inspection of the states of input lines connected to such apparatus. For more complicated situations, where events may not occur in a strict sequence, it becomes more convenient to make use of priority interrupts to inititiate response to events. Tasks to be performed under interrupt control are coded by the user as special subroutines known as “Actions.” It is a feature of PACER that the user can arrange for the Executive to run Actions automatically at specified times. The main program is then able to carry out processing that it would not be able to undertake if it had to make repeated checks on the time.     

Life events and internalizing problems among Chinese school children: An examination of the cognitive diathesis model

This study examined the cognitive diathesis model for child internalizing problems among 459 Chinese elementary school children in grades four to six. Life events were associated with beliefs about external control and threat perception bias, both of which were related to child internalizing problems. The relation of life events to internalizing problems was partially mediated by threat perception bias measured by ambiguous situation task. The main findings indicate that the cognitive diathesis theory for child internalizing problems might be applicable to Chinese children. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the internalizing problems of Chinese children, which can lead to use of more effective treatments.     

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?