![[title]](http://images.parents.mdpcdn.com/sites/parents.com/files/TharakornArunothai.jpg "[title]")
professor paul bloom:so, most of what we do these days – our methods,our theories, our ideas – are shaped,to some extent, by piaget's influence.and so, what i want to do is begin this class that's going totalk about cognitive development by talking about his ideas.his idea was that children are active thinkers;they're trying to figure out the world.he often described them as little scientists.and incidentally,
to know where he's coming fromon this, he had a very dramatic and ambitious goal.he didn't start off because he was interested in children.he started off because he was interested in the emergence ofknowledge in general. it was a discipline hedescribed as genetic epistemology – the origins ofknowledge. but he studied development ofthe individual child because he was convinced that thisdevelopment will tell him about the development of knowledgemore generally.
there's a very snooty phrasethat--i don't know if you ever heard it before.it's a great phrase. it's "ontogeny recapitulatesphylogeny." and the idea of this--what thatmeans is that development of an individual mimics or repeatsdevelopment of the species. now, it's entirely not true,but it's a beautiful phrase and piaget was committed to this.he was very interested in saying, "look.we'll figure how a kid develops and that will tell us about thedevelopment of knowledge more
generally."so, piaget viewed the child as a scientist who developed thisunderstanding, these schemas,these little, miniature theories of theworld. and they did this through twosorts of mechanisms: assimilation and accommodation.so, assimilation would be the act of expanding the range ofthings that you respond to. piaget's example would be ababy who's used to sucking on a breast might come to suck on abottle or on a rattle.
that's changing the scope ofthings that you respond to. accommodation is changing howyou do it. a baby will form his mouthdifferently depending on what he's sucking on.and so, these processes where you take in--i'm giving this ina very physical way, but in a more psychologicalsense you have a way of looking at the world.you could expand it to encompass new things,assimilation. but you could also change yoursystem of knowledge itself –
accommodation.and piaget argued that these two mechanisms of learning drovethe child through different stages.and he had a stage theory, which was quite different fromthe freudian stage theory that we have been introduced to.so his methods were to ask children to solve problems andto ask them questions. and his discoveries that--theydid them in different ways at different ages led to theemergence of the stage theory. so, for piaget,the first stage is the
sensorimotor stage or thesensorimotor period. for here the child is purely aphysical creature. the child has no understandingin any real way of the external world.there's no understanding of the past, no understanding of thefuture, no stability, no differentiation.the child just touches and sees, but doesn't yet reason. and it's through this stagethat a child gradually comes to acquire object permanence.
object permanence is theunderstanding that things exist when you no longer see them.so those of you in front, you're looking at me and i go.it occurred to me it'd be a great magic trick if i thenappeared in back. but no, i'm just here.that's object permanence. if i went under here and thenthe people said, "where the hell did he go?class is over," that would show a lack of object permanence.so, adults have object permanence.piaget's very interesting claim
is that kids don't.before six-month-olds, piaget observed,you take an object the kid likes like a rattle,you hide it, you put it behind something,it's like it's gone. and he claimed the child reallythinks it's just gone. things don't continue to existwhen i'm not looking at them anymore.and so he noticed they--they're surprised by peek-a-boo.and piaget's claim was one reason why they're surprised atpeek-a-boo is you go--you look
at a kid,the kid's smiling and go, "oh, peek-a-boo," and youclose--and you cover your face and the kid says,"he's gone." "peek-a-boo.""oh, there he is. he's gone."and you really--that's the claim.piaget also discovered that older children fail at a taskthat's known as the a-not-b task.and peter gray in his psychology textbook refers to itas the "changing hiding places"
problem, which is probably abetter name for it. and here's the idea.you take a nine-month-old and for piaget a nine-month-old isjust starting to make sense of objects and their permanence.you take an object and you put it here in a cup where the kidcan't see it, but it's in the cup.so the kid, if you were the kid, will reach for it.you do it again, reach for it. you do it again, reach for it.that's point a. then you take--you move it overhere.
piaget observed kids wouldstill reach for this. it's like they're not smartenough to figure out that it's not there anymore,even if they see it move. and this was more evidence thatthey just don't understand objects, and that this thingtakes a lot of time and learning to develop.the next stage is the preoperational stage.the child starts off grasping the world only in a physicalway, in a sensorimotor way, but when he gets to thepreoperational period the
capacity to represent the world,to have the world inside your head, comes into being.but it's limited and it's limited in a couple of strikingways. one way in which it's limitedis that children are egocentric. now, egocentrism has a meaningin common english which means to be selfish.piaget meant it in a more technical way.he claimed that children at this age literally can'tunderstand that others can see the world differently from them.so, one of his demonstrations
was the three mountains task.we have three mountains over there.you put a child on one side of the mountains and you ask him todraw it, and a four- or five-year-old can do it easily,but then you ask him to draw it as it would appear from theother side and children find this extraordinarily difficult.they find it very difficult to grasp the world as anotherperson might see it. another significant findingpiaget had about this phase of development concerns what'scalled "conservation."
the notion of conservation isthat there's ways to transform things such that some aspects ofthem change but others remain the same.so, for instance, if you take a glass of waterand you pour it into another glass that's shallow or tall,it won't change the amount of water you have.if you take a bunch of pennies and you spread them out,you don't get more pennies. but kids, according to piaget,don't know that and this is one of the real cool demonstrations.any of you who have access to a
four- or five-year-old,[laughter] a sibling or something--do nottake one without permission, but if you have access to afour- or five-year-old you can do this yourself.this is what it looks like. the first one has no sound.the second one is going to be sound that's going to come on atthe end. but there's two rows ofcheckers. she asks the kid which one hasmore. the kid says they're the same.then she says--now she asks him
which one has more,that or that. so that's really stupid.and it's an amazing finding kids will do that and it's arobust finding. here's another example.so, they're the same. so, it's a cool finding of thatstage, suggesting a limitation in how you deal and make senseof the world. the next phase,concrete operations, from seven to twelve,you can solve the conservation problem,but still you're limited to the
extent you're capable ofabstract reasoning. so the mathematical notions ofinfinity or logical notions like logical entailment are beyond achild of this age. the child is able to do a lot,but still it's to some extent stuck in the concrete world.and then finally, at around age twelve,you could get abstract and scientific reasoning.and this is the piagetian theory in very brief form.now, piaget fared a lot better than did freud or skinner forseveral reasons.
one reason is these areinteresting and falsifiable claims about child development.so claims that--about the failure of conservation inchildren at different ages could be easily tested andsystematically tested, and in fact,there's a lot of support for them.piaget had a rich theoretical framework, pulling together allsorts of observations in different ways,wrote many, many books and articles and articulated histheory very richly.
and most of all,i think, he had some really striking findings.before piaget, nobody noticed theseconservation findings. before piaget,nobody noticed that babies had this problem tracking andunderstanding objects. at the same time,however, there are limitations in piaget's theory.some of these limitations are theoretical.it's an interesting question as to whether he really explainshow a child goes from a concrete
thinker to an abstract thinker,or how he goes from not having object permanence tounderstanding object permanence. there's methodologicallimitations. piaget was really big intoquestion and answer, but one problem with this isthat children aren't very good with language,and this might lead you to underestimate how much theyknow. and this is particularly aproblem the younger you get. methodology is going to loomheavy in the discussion of any
science and that includespsychology. often 90% of the game isdiscovering a clever method through which to test yourhypotheses. we're going to talk a littlebit about that regarding babies. i'll give you another examplefrom a very different domain. there was a set of scientistsinterested in studying tickling. so, when you tickle somebody,under what circumstances will they laugh?where do you have to tickle them?can you tickle yourself?
does it have to be a surprise,and so on? it turns out very difficult tostudy this in a lab. you're not going to have yourexperimental credit. you come into the lab and say,"okay. i'm the graduate student.ha, ha, ha." and [laughter]in fact, an example of a methodological attempt was doneby henry gleitman at university of pennsylvania,who built a tickle machine, which was this box with thesetwo giant hands that went
"r-r-r-r."this was a failure because people could not go near thetickle machine without convulsing in laughter.but we will discuss when we have a lecture on laughter a bitof the tickle sciences. and finally there's factual.what do infants and children really know?it's possible that due to the methodological limitations ofpiaget, he systematically underestimated what children andbabies know. and in fact,i'll present some evidence
suggesting that this is infact--that this is the case. so, i want to introduce you tothe modern science of infant cognition.infant cognition has been something studied for a verylong time. and there was a certain viewthat has had behind it a tremendous philosophical andpsychological consensus. and it's summarized in thisonion headline here. and the idea is that babies arestupid, that babies really don't know much about the world.now, the work that this
onion headline issatirizing is the recent studies,which i'm going to talk about, suggested that on the contrary,babies might be smarter than you think.and to discover the intelligence of babies we haveto ourselves be pretty smart in developing different techniques.to study what a baby knows, you can't ask your questions.babies can't talk. you could look at what it doesbut babies are not very coordinated or skilled so youneed to use clever methods.
one clever method is to look attheir brain waves [laughter]. this child on the right diedduring testing. it was a tragic--it was crushedby the weights [laughter] of the electrodes.he's happy though. you could study their brainwaves. one of the few things babiescan do is they could suck on a pacifier.and you might think, well, how could you learnanything from that? well, for instance,you could build machines that
when babies suck on a pacifierthey hear music or they hear language,and then you could look at how much they suck on the pacifierto determine what they like. but undeniably we know most ofour--we got most of our knowledge about babies fromstudies of their looking times. that's one thing babies can do.they can look. and i have up here--this is apicture of elizabeth spelke, who is a developmentalpsychologist who's developed the most research on looking atbabies' looking times and what
you could learn from them.and i have here two ways you could learn from looking.one is preference. so for instance,suppose you want to know, for whatever reason,do babies like the looks of dogs or cats?well, you could put a baby down, have a picture of a doghere, a picture of a cat here, and see which one the babylooks at. babies can move their eyes andthat could tell you something. do babies distinguish prettyfaces from ugly faces?
well, put a pretty face here,an ugly face here, see if the baby prefers to lookat the pretty one. you could also do habituationand surprise. and much of the studies i'mgoing to talk about here involve habituation and surprise.habituation is a fancy word for boredom.what you do is you show a baby something over and over again.now, remember from behaviorism the baby will learn this isn'tvery interesting. then you show the babysomething different.
if the baby really sees it asdifferent, the baby will look longer, and you could use thatas a measure of what babies find different.for instance, suppose you want to know if thebaby can tell green from red. well, you could show the baby agreen patch, a green patch, a green patch,a green patch; the baby'll get bored,then a red patch. if they all look the same tothe baby, the baby will just continue to tune out,but if the red looks different
the baby will perk up.and this is, in fact, one way they studycolor vision in babies. surprise is related to this.you could show babies something that shouldn't happen.if babies are like--if babies also think it shouldn't happen,they might look longer, and essentially what happens isscientists do magic tricks to explore this very thing.and to start with some real examples, a lot of this infantresearch has gone back to the piagetian question of objectpermanence,
asking, "is it really truebabies don't know that objects remain even when they're out ofsight?" so one very simple study byspelke and baillargeon: have babies shown a block witha bar going back and forth like that.so the bar just goes back and forth.now, there's something you do that's so obvious you probablydon't even know you're doing it. when you see a display likethat, what you assume is there's a bar there, and what that meansis there's something in the
middle that you've never seenbefore. but of course,if you were a simple perceptual creature, you would just seethat there'd be a bar on top and a bar on the bottom.you wouldn't expect anything in the middle because you never sawanything in the middle. so, what you do then is youshow babies this and then you show them either b or c and ifwe do this with adults you expect b, c is almost a joke.and, in fact, babies respond the same way.babies expect there to be an
entire, complete bar and aresurprised and look longer at the broken bar.other studies, some of them--well,here's another study by rene baillargeon looking at the samething in a different way. you show the baby,say a six-month-old, a stage with a block on it.then a screen rises and obscures the block.now, if the babies expect the block to still be there,they should think the block should stop the screen.on the other hand,
if out of sight out of mind,they should expect the screen to keep going.so, what you do is you set up a couple of displays,one where the block is stopped, the other one where you takethis away with a trap door and it keeps going.and, as you see, the baby screams when thishappens. that doesn't really happen,but they do look longer. one final example of an objectpermanence study. some of this work's been doneat yale in karen wynn's lab,
where they look at babies'understanding of addition and subtraction.and a lot of it is done with real objects,but there's also animated versions so here is an animatedexample. babies are surprised.they expect 2 - 1 = 1 and when 2 - 1 = 2 or 3 or 0,they look longer, indicating surprise.and even six-month-olds are sensitive to these rudimentaryfacts of arithmetic, telling us something abouttheir mathematical knowledge,
but also telling us somethingabout that they expect things to remain when they're out ofsight. now, this research suggeststhat infants' understanding of the physical world is there fromthe very start, but at the same time notentirely. we know there are certainthings babies don't know. here's an example.suppose you show babies this. you have a block here and thenyou have something above there floating in mid air.babies find this surprising.
even six-month-olds find thissurprising. it violates gravity,but six-month-olds aren't smart enough to know that a block juststuck over here is also surprising.twelve-month-olds will think that it should fall.six-month-olds don't, and even 12-month-olds don'tfind anything weird about this, while adults are sophisticatedenough to understand that that's an unstable configuration andshould fall over. so, although some things arebuilt in, some things develop.
and this raises the questionof, "how do we explain development?"how do we explain when babies come to know things that theydidn't originally know? well, one answer is neuralmaturation, growth of the brain. most of the neurons you havenow in your head, right now, you had when youwere in your mother's uterus. what happens in developmentisn't for the most part the growth of new neurons.it's for the most part pruning, getting rid of neurons.so, the neural structures
change radically as babies kindof get rid of excess neurons through development.at the same time though, connections between neuronsgrow like crazy and they--and this process of synaptic growthwhere there are the connections across different synapses peaksat about two years. finally, remember myelination,where you sort of get this fatty sheath over your neuron tomake it more effective? that also happens throughdevelopment, and in fact, it goes through development andeven teenagers are not fully
myelinated.in particular, they're not fully myelinated intheir frontal lobes. recall that frontal lobes areinvolved in things like restraint and willpower.and so, it could be the problem is the baby's brain doesn'tdevelop yet. another possibility is there'sproblems with inhibition. this is related,again, to the frontal lobes and this comes out with the a,not b error. so, remember the baby reaches,reaches, reaches.
it's moved, reach,follow, keeps reaching the same place.and it could be that babies don't know anything aboutobjects. but another possibility is onceyou do something it's kind of hard to stop.it takes a bit of control to stop.and there's all sorts of independent evidence that babieslack this control. the part of their brain thatcould control certain behaviors is just not active yet.there's a very nice
illustration of inhibitoryproblems from a "simpsons" episode that actually sort ofcovers anything you might want to know about developmentaldifferences. and that basically may sum upmuch of developmental psychology.that the child essentially--he does a, a, a.it's moved. you go, "doh!"and he keeps going for it. and there's some evidencethat's true. adele diamond who studies thisfinds that although kids reach
for a, they look for b,as if they know it's there but they can't stop themselves fromreaching. and we'll continue this theme alittle bit later. finally, it might be kids don'tknow things. some things you've got to learn.and this is true in all sorts of domains – in the socialworld, in the economic world, in the political world – andit's true as well in the physical world.in fact, there's some things even adults don't know.so, here's a study by michael
mccloskey with college students.here's the idea. you have a tube,a transparent--a tube--a hollow tube, and at the top of the tubeyou throw a ball through so it whips through the tube and itcomes out. the question is,"what happens to it?" does it go in the path of a,or does it go in the path of b? without looking around,who votes for a? who votes for b?here's the weird thing. whenever i do this at yaleeverybody gets the damn thing
right [laughter].at johns hopkins, 50/50, [laughter]for a and b. i got to get a better demo.but anyway, college students not here, show systematic biasesof incorrect physical intuitions.here's a twist, and if you found people whowere less wonderful than you all, and asked them you'd get alot of people saying the curving thing.but here's a twist. ask somebody,"what if you took a tube and
you squirted water through it?where would the water go?" nobody chooses b.everybody knows the water would continue in a straight line,suggesting that when you have experience that helps you out,but in absence of experience you're kind of lost.we've talked about the physical world.what about the social world? what about the world of people?well, there's a lot of research on this as well.babies start off with some social preferences.if you take newborn
babies--it's very hard to doresearch with newborn babies actually because of the consentprocedure and everything, so most of this work is done infrance [laughter], where they have no laws at all.they just rush in to--women give birth and they rush in andthey say, "we are psychologists,"and then we do experiments on the babies, and it's terrific.and this is one of them where they compare babies looking atthis versus this. babies like the one that lookslike a face.
these are newborns.there are some preferences with humans and with other primatesto favor faces. babies are also social animalstoo, so they're natural mimics. andrew meltzoff,for instance, has found that if you go to anewborn baby, and if you find a newborn baby,this is the first thing you should do.stick your face right up to the newborn baby and go like thisand stick your tongue out. and meltzoff finds that babiesmore often than not stick their
tongues out back,suggesting some sort of social connection from one person toanother, and then later on babies are mimics.babies more often than not will copy the face next to them.now, these--the nature of these responses, this preferringfaces, this sort of mimicry, is a matter of debate,and there's a lot of research going on asking how smart arebabies. can we see--use some of thesame methods that we've looked at for the physical world tolook at the social world?
and to illustrate one of thestudies, i'll tell you about a study that i did with valeriekuhlmeier and karen wynn. and so, what we tested wasnine-month-olds and twelve-month-olds,and we showed them movies. so, they're sitting down andthey're seeing a movie where one character's going to help a ballachieve a goal, and another character's goingto hinder the ball. and then we're going to seewhether they expect the ball to approach the one that helped itversus the one that hindered it.
so, this is what a baby wouldsee. this is literally the samemovie a baby would see in the experiment.the thing is for these sorts of experiments there is a lot ofcontrol, so something that's a square in one movie will be atriangle in another movie; something that's on the top inone movie will be on the bottom in another movie.so, this is an example movie but this is what babies wouldsee. and they'd see this over andover again and the question is
would they expect babies--wouldbabies expect the one to approach the one that helped itor approach the one that hindered it?and what we find is, statistically,babies look longer when shown a movie where it approaches theone that hindered it versus helped it.and this we take as preliminary evidence that they have a socialinterpretation. they see this movie as you seethis movie in terms of helping and hindering,and somebody going to somebody
that helped it versus hinderedit. you could then ask--this makesa prediction that babies should themselves prefer the creaturewho's the helper versus the hinderer,and to explore this, a graduate student in thisdepartment, kiley hamlin, has started a series of studieswhere they show babies three-dimensional scenes andthen give them the characters and see which one they reachfor. so, here's video so you couldsee how this experiment is done.
now, the next trial is from adifferent study. a different thing we use,and the baby is given a choice. one thing to knowmethodologically is the person giving a choice is blind to thestudy. and blind here is a technicalterm meaning she had no idea what the baby saw,and the point about this is to avoid either intentional orunintentional sort of trying to get the answer you want.she couldn't do that because she didn't know what the rightanswer is.
so, here's what the baby wouldsee. so, this suggests that somesocial understanding may be there from the very start.this evidence is tentative, very controversial.but now, i want to raise a huge developmental puzzle and thepuzzle is there are some ways in which babies are--not justbabies, but young children are veryclueless when it comes to people.and so, i have a film clip here of two very nice studies showingbabies' ignorant--sorry,
young children's ignorance ofother people. i'll show you the studies andthen we'll briefly discuss what they mean.professor paul bloom: before discussing that examplein a little bit more detail, any questions?what are your questions? yes, in back.student: [inaudible] professor paul bloom:typically--i don't know for those particular children,but typically on those tasks three-year-olds and youngfour-year-olds tend to fail,
and around the age of four orfive kids tend to succeed. there's sort of a period aroundthe age of four, four and a half,where kids make the transition from failure to success.the question, by the way, was when dochildren--in that video when were the--what were the ages ofthe children who failed and who passed? yes.student: [inaudible] professor paul bloom:the question of whether
discriminant conditioning hasbeen used with babies to explore what sort of concepts they have.i don't know. does anybody--it has been--graduate student: --it's not as effective--professor paul bloom: koleen answered and said thatit's not as effective as other methods.part of the problem with using operant conditioning with babiesis it's difficult to get them to behave in any systematic way.so, the looking-time measures tend to be more subtle.any other questions?
oh.yes. student: [inaudible]professor paul bloom: oh.the question of why they chose--the baby--the kids chosethe rocket ship one as opposed to the rafael one.it wasn't what they were interested in in the experiment.and my bet is when they chose the stickers they had a prettygood sense of why, of which ones the boys wouldprefer in those studies. the question of why a boy mightprefer one sort of sticker,
and you might get a differentresponse with a girl, is going to come up later whenwe discuss different theories of sex differences.but that was something i think they were just assuming in thestudy to get it off the ground. okay. there's a huge debate overwhat's going on there. and if you listened at the endto the psychologist summarizing the data, the psychologist had avery good and very clear and strong idea of what was goingon.
it was that children need toknow more about minds. the children don't know aboutthat you can do something with the intent to deceive.they don't understand that somebody could choose what youchose in a malicious way. this is possible.this is one respectable theory, but the alternative is theyhave the right knowledge, but they suffer from problemswith inhibition. so, consider both studies.the first study, the one with the deceptivedolls with the big shoes and
little shoes,is actually fairly difficult. and it's possible that childrenkind of got overwhelmed with it, and when asked what would themother think, who the mother would thinkstole the food, responded with who really stolethe food. and that there's some pulltowards the right answer that makes this task difficult.the second one--the second study illustrates this issueeven more clearly. take the boy who kept failing.he kept pointing to the rocket
ship and mean monkey kept takingit away. it's possible that he genuinelydidn't know what to do, that he wasn't smart enough tounderstand that he needed to point to the other one.but it's also possible that it's a homer simpson-likeeffect, where when asked to point to what he wants,he just couldn't help but point to the one he wanted.and that the extra work it takes to lie was beyond him.and, in support of the second alternative, even adults findthese tasks involving lying and
deception more difficult.they were slower at them. we make more mistakes thantasks that don't involve lying and deception.so, i'm raising this not to solve the problem.you'll read more about it in the peter gray textbook and moreabout it in the norton readings on development,but just to raise this as an interesting area of debate.another interesting area of debate is, "what's therelationship between different sorts of development?"so, i started off with piaget,
and piaget, like freud,believed in general, across the board changes in howchildren think. an alternative,though, is that there's separate modules,and this is a view developed, again, by noam chomsky,and also by the philosopher of mind jerry fodor,who claimed that the whole idea of a child developing as asingle story is mistaken. what you get instead is thereare separate pre-wired systems for reasoning about the world.these systems have some
built-in knowledge,and they have to do some learning,but the learning pattern varies from system to system andthere's a separateness to them. why should we take this viewseriously? well, one reason is that thereare developmental disorders that seem to involve damage to onesystem but not to another. and the classic case of this isa disorder known as autism. and autism is something i'vealways found a fascinating disorder for many reasons.it's actually why i entered
psychology.i started off working with children with autism.and it could be taken as a striking illustration of how thesocial part of your brain is distinct from other parts ofyour brain. so, what autism is is adisorder that strikes about one in a thousand people,mostly boys. and the dominant problemsconcern--consist of a lack of social connectedness,problems with language, problems dealing with people,and more generally,
a problem of what thepsychologist, simon baron-cohen has describedas "mind blindness." in that autistic people show noimpairments dealing with the physical world,they show no impairments on--they don't necessarily showany impairments on mathematical skills or spatial skills,but they have a lot of problems with people.now, many autistic children have no language;they're totally shut off from society.but even some of them who'd
learned language and who managedto get some sort of independent life,nevertheless will suffer from a severe social impairment.and this could be shown in all sorts of ways.a simple experiment developed by simon baron-cohen goes likethis. you show this to three- andfour-year-olds. there's four candies there,and you say, "this is charlie in the middle.which chocolate will charlie take?"for most children and most of
you, i hope, the answer's prettyclear: this one. autistic children will oftenjust shrug, say, "how could i know?"because they don't instinctively appreciate thatpeople's interests and desires tend to be attuned to wherethey're looking. another sort of task,which is a task that's been done hundreds,perhaps thousands of times, is known as "the false-belieftask" and here's the idea. you show the child thefollowing situation.
there's a doll named maxie andmaxie puts the ball in the cupboard.maxie leaves and a second doll enters.the second doll takes the ball out of the cupboard and puts itunder the bed. maxie comes back and thequestion is, "where will maxie look for the ball?"now, this is a question about your understanding about minds.the question of where is the ball really is a question aboutthe physical world. everyone can solve it,but this question is hard.
the right answer is maxwill--maxie will look in the cupboard, even though it's notreally there because maxie has a false belief about the world.three-year-olds find this difficult.two-year-olds find this difficult.four-year-olds and five-year-olds are able to passthis task. normal adults are able to passthis task. children with autism haveserious problems. and often, people with autismwho are otherwise very high
functioning will fail this task.they'll say, "oh, he must think it'snot--he'll--he's going to check under the bed."any questions about autism? professor paul bloom:good question. it isn't.they're both experiments designed to tap an appreciationof false belief. the deception one with theshoes and everything looked at it in the course of deception.can you understand that the mother might think it's thatperson even though it's really
that person?and our kid failed. this is a sort of stripped-downversion without all the fanciness but it tests exactlythe same thing. professor paul bloom:nobody knows, but there's a theory whichwon't answer your question but will put it into a broadercontext. simon baron-cohen argues thatthere are certain abilities that tend to be more sequestered formales, and other abilities that aremore sequestered,
more focused on females.social abilities, he argues, tend to be morefemale than male. so, the way baron puts it,provocatively, is to be a man is to sufferfrom a very mild form of autism [laughter].the idea is then that autistic individuals suffer from what hecalls extreme male brains, and as such,it stands to reason that they'd be more sampled from the malepopulation than the female population.that's such an interesting
issue, that again,when we return to talk about sex differences we'll look atthat in a little bit more detail to see if it's supported by theevidence. professor paul bloom:i'm sorry. tell me the--is the severity ofautism… student: [inaudible]professor paul bloom: it's an interesting question.the question is, "how do you think about theseverity of autism with regard to developmental stages?"and sort of surprisingly,
autism can't really be thoughtof in that way. so, it's not like an adult withautism is like a three-year-old or a two-year-old.in some ways, somebody with autism isn't likeany child at all, any normally developing childat all. so, it's not really adevelopmental delay in the way that it might make sense tothink about certain forms of retardation.on the other hand, when we think about how severeautism is we do look at things
like how much language does theperson have, and in that sense,it is related to development. yes.student: what are the chances thatsomeone who's autistic would be able to overcome theirdeficiencies? professor paul bloom:the majority of people with autism.it's a good question. the question is,"what are the chances that somebody with autism will beable to overcome their
deficiencies?"autism is a funny disorder in that there's a lot of mediapublication and media presentation.often the people who are showcased in the media tend tobe very exceptional. so, there's a woman,temple grandin, who's autistic and--has anybodyhere heard of temple grandin? she wrote some wonderful booksabout her experience as an autistic person,but she's very unusual. so a lot depends,to answer your question,
how one defines autism,and whether one includes asperger syndrome,which is a limited, a more mild syndrome,as a form of autism. the answer is that the majorityof people with autism have severe problems,and will not, and at this stage,with this level of therapy, will not lead a normal life.student: more specifically,what i meant was, when you showed the example ofrain man, ere they exceptional
right.the question is about so-called autistic savants.so, rain man, the character played by dustinhoffman, had extraordinary mathematical abilities.and some people with autism have extraordinary artisticabilities or mathematical abilities or musical abilitiesand these are amazing. it's an amazing question whythey have it but this is a very small minority.this is a very--it's fascinating that it happens atall, that you have severe damage
but compensated with somepowerful skill. now, i know i'm answering yourquestion i think in a better way, but it's actually veryrare. most people with autism do nothave any exceptional abilities that go along with it. another question is if youbelieve in modules--if there are modules, what are they?and so far when reviewing the developmental data we've talkedabout two of them: physics and people.an object module and a social
module.but other people have argued that there is a special modulein your brain for dealing with artifacts,that is, things like tables and chairs and cars and forks.some people have argued there's a module for sociology,for dealing with human groups, races and classes and so on.some have even argued that there is an intuitive biology,a common-sense biological understanding of the worldthat's separate from your understanding of people andphysics.
and, in fact,the most dominant proponent of the view is our very own frankkeil, master of morse college atyale, who has strongly defended the notion of an intuitivebiological module. final question,just to raise: i've talked in terms of themodular view but there might also be profound generaldifferences between children and adults,not just specific to how you think about objects or how youthink about people or how you
think about this or how youthink about that, but rather more general.and one claim, which we're going to return tobriefly next class when we talk about language,is that there's a very, very big difference between acreature that doesn't have language and a creature thatdoes. and part of the claim is thatlearning a language, learning to speak,reconfigures the human brain in such a way that is reallyexceptional.
and that has no parallel in anyother species. and this is an interestingclaim and one we'll talk about. finally, i want to end with anexample from stephen jay gould. suppose you hate development;you hate developmental psychology;you hate babies; you hate children;they're not cute; they're ugly;you don't want to have them; you don't want to study them;you're annoyed that we have to discuss them.fine.
but there are reasons to studydevelopment even if you are not interested in children becausesometimes developmental studies and developmental data anddevelopmental science can inform questions about adults.and stephen jay gould has a very nice example of this.he asked the question "is a zebra a black animal with whitestripes or a white animal with black stripes?"now, you could look at adult zebras all day long and you'renever going to figure this out. but if you want to know theanswer, and i knew it,
but i forget what it is--itdoesn't matter. but if you wanted to know ityou could. you would look at developmentand you'd watch the embryological development of azebra and that's how you would learn the answer to yourquestion. in fact, i'll end with a nicequote. this is by the famousbiologist, d'arcy thompson, who wrote the book on growthand form, and it's sort of the modelof many developmental
psychologists and manyevolutionary psychologists so i'll end with this:"everything is the way it is because it got that way."okay. i'll see you next week.
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