20. Origins 2013 Ind Diffs Concl. and Social Cognition 1 (4)
Transcript of 20. Origins 2013 Ind Diffs Concl. and Social Cognition 1 (4)
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Individual Differences
Two ways to study individual differences:
1. Relate earlier-developing psychological attributes (cognitiveabilities, temperament) to later-developing attributes.
Do individual differences in geometrical form analysis
predict performance at reading maps?
Do individual differences in numerical discriminationpredict performance on symbolic math problems?
2. Relate performance on tests administered earlier in devt. to
real-world outcomes.
Do people with higher SAT scores (or IQ scores) end upwith more degrees? higher income?
Two updates on the first enterprise
The second enterprise
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Predicting later cognitive abilities from earlier ones:
Two Updates
Non-symbolic numerical discrimination and symbolic number."suppose someone found that numerical discrimination in
infancy predicted later symbolic math performance. Would that
mean we are innately predistined to success or failure in academic
math?"
1. SRCD (Brannon lab):
numerical discrimination tested at 6 months (Xu displays).
children retested at regular intervals, from 1-3.5 years.
num. acuity at 6 mos predicted acuity at all later ages tested.
num. acuity at 6 mos also predicted mastery of numberwords and counting.
2. SRCD (Gilmore lab): a real counter-example to the conclusion
about predestination.
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Why do some children do better at discriminating
numbers of dots than others?
To test number, must control for continuous variables like dot size.So some dot problems look like this....
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Why do some children do better at discriminating
numbers of dots than others?
To test number, must control for continuous variables like dot size.So some dot problems look like this....
....and others look like this.
But for these problems, you have to inhibit responses to size
differences as you focus on number.
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Why do some children do better at discriminating
numbers of dots than others?
Some dot discrimination problems demand inhibitory control.
Inhibitory control requires executive function (Lindsey's lecture).
Individual differences in EF predict math achievement.
Gilmore (SRCD), two experiments.
Exp. 1: Replicates Halberda et al's finding that numerical acuity
correlates with school achievement. Divides trials into two types:
number positively vs. negatively correlated with item size.
pos. correlation, low EF demands neg. correlation, high EF demands
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Why do some children do better at discriminating
numbers of dots than others?
Exp. 1 findings:Numerical discrimination predicted school achievement on the high
EF trials, not on the low EF trials.
Suggestion: individual differences in EF underlie this correlation.
pos. correlation, low EF demands neg. correlation, high EF demands
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Why do some children do better at discriminating
numbers of dots than others?
Exp. 1 findings:Numerical discrimination predicted school achievement on the high
EF trials, not on the low EF trials.
Suggestion: individual differences in EF underlie this correlation.
Exp. 2:
Replicated Halberda et al again, this time with a separate test battery
measuring executive function (like the tests Lindsey described).
Findings: controlling for EF, numerical discrimination no longer
predicted school math achievement. controlling for numericaldiscrimination, EF strongly predicted school math achievement.
(further experiments by Gilmore: non-symbolic addition tests do
predict school math achievement....)
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Summary
Both core numerical abilities and executive function predict schoolmath performance.
Both of these abilities are highly malleable and trainable.
Individual differences do not imply that fixed differences in cognitive
ability.
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Predicting Real World Outcomes
Much research in individual differences seeks to predict who will
perform well at some future activity:
ex: intuitive personality theories predict success at careers
SAT-Q tests predict success in math & engineering professions
IQ tests predict future earnings potential
Does this predictive power have normative implications: e.g., are
people who score higher on SAT tests all-around smarter than those
who score lower?
Three cases that cast doubt on this conclusion.
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Case 1: personality traits and careers
E.G. Boring
(chair, Harvard Psych,
1930s)
Example: Jewish personality traits and academic potential
In the 30s, no Jewish faculty at Harvard.Many Jewish students in Boring's lab.
None got good academic jobs on leaving
his lab.
The defects of his race (Winston, 1998).
A study of his letters of recommendation:
talkative
aggressive
characteristic Jewish eagerness
gesticulates excitedly
Boring's error: confusing what was typicalof professors in his field
with what was necessary for success in that field.
But NB: these traits werepredictive of failure, because Jews weren't
hired.
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A common claim: women have lower spatial ability.
The evidence: women perform less well at mental rotation tasks.
Case 2: Spatial ability and gender
My puzzlement: we had been studying spatial abilities a lot,
and we didn't see evidence either for a unitary dimension of
"spatial ability" or for gender differences on any core spatial
tasks.
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Overall Performance
(Grace, Shutts, Izard, Dehaene & Spelke, 2006; Izard & Spelke, 2009; replicated by Dillon et al., in review)
High Performance
Are boys more sensitive to geometry in visual forms?
Average Performance High Performance
No sex difference favoring boys.
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(Grace, Shutts, Izard, Dehaene & Spelke, 2006; c.f. Izard & Spelke, 2009)
girls>boys
* **
(*pgirls
Are boys more sensitive to any aspect of geometry?
male superiority at mental
rotation may trace back to
infancy
(Quinn & Liben, 2008; Moore & Johnson, 2008)
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(Grace, Shutts, Izard, Dehaene & Spelke, 2006; Izard & Spelke, 2009)
Boys and girls show highly similar performance profiles
Highly convergent performance by boys and girls.
r=.888, p
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So why the belief in sex differences, and the focus on
mental rotation on standardized tests?
The goal of the tests is to predict who will succeed.For social reasons, male students are more likely to pursue &
succeed at academic careers than females:
discrimination, overt and covert
a tendency of both genders to go into fields where theirown gender is represented (e.g., few male nurses or midwives...)
Therefore, mental rotation is a better predictor of academic
success than are the other measures.
But this doesNOT mean that it is a better indicator of cognitive
ability. Voice depth or hair length also will predict academic
success....
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Case 3: IQ tests and earnings potential
Herrnstein, Murray: IQ in the meritocracy
Children with higher IQs tend to become adults with more education
and money
So is IQ a good measure of ability?
Tests of ability: anagrams, reading prose passages
not free-style rapping
Why? High-income adults are likely to do cross-word puzzles andread novels. They aren't likely to be freestyle rappers.
My guess: from the standpoint of cognitive psychology, effective
rapping requires at least as much vocabulary, verbal fluency, etc etc.
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Summary
Attempts to measure intelligence or specific aspects of cognitive
aptitude are not worthless or stupid. But it's hard to get them right.
The best hope for better understanding individual differences in
cognition comes not from research linking individual cognitive
variables to successful real-world outcomes (like going to college,
earning lots of money, or becoming a Harvard professor).
Instead, it comes from research linking individual differences in core
cognition to individual differences in constructed cognitive abilities:
research like the studies discussed in the first half of this topic.
To date, these studies show no gender or social class differences in
children's performance. These findings should encourage us to look
critically at the measures that do, like IQ and SATs.
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Social Cognition
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Humans are a highly social species
We live in communities (throughout human evolution).
--Community members cooperate to accomplish tasks that no
single person could perform alone.--Community members share information: most of what we
know has been learned from others.
These activities surely account for much of our success as a species.
Community members share a culture, distinct from other cultures
(language, food production & preparation, tools & technology, music
& dance, dress, games, rituals, belief systems). Some of these
distinctions make obvious sense (food availability & spoilage issues).
Others are more puzzling:
Why different languages?
Why rituals? religions?
A hope: insights from studies of children.
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Learning about the social world
To navigate the social world, the child must come to:
1. recognize other specific individuals.
2. learn about the social behavior of each individual toward the
child and toward one another (friends or foes? selfish or
cooperative?)
3. learn the overall structure of the social landscape (what groups
are there? how are they organized? what are the dimensions of
status?). NB: this too varies across cultures.
4. learn culture-specific beliefs and rituals.
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Three topics:
1. finding good social partners and cooperating with them: today
2. discovering social groups and learning their norms: Lindsey,
Thursday
3. social group preferences and biases: last class
Learning about the social world
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People as social partners
Newborns: attend to people from birth (faces, voices).
2 month olds: smile, engage socially, turn-taking.
By 7-9 months: attachments, seeking proximity to known
others.
First question: How do infants come to distinguish people fromeach other so that they can form social relationships?
recognizing faces
detecting states of social engagement
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Face Recognition in Adults
A special system for identifying faces.
evidence: inversion
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Identifying People: Adults
A special system for identifying faces.
evidence: orientation specificity
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Identifying People: Adults
A special system for identifying faces.
evidence: species-specificity
This is Mary
Which is Mary?
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Identifying People: Adults
A special system for identifying faces.
evidence: species-specificity
This is Fred
Which is Fred?
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Identifying People: AdultsA special system for identifying faces.
evidence: species-specificity
Human adults: good with human faces, bad with monkey faces.
Adult monkeys good with monkey faces, bad with human faces.
High abilities to recognize individuals of ones own species by their
faces.
Familiarize:
Test:
Pascalis
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Identifying People: Adult BrainsTask: passive viewing of faces, artifact objects, scenes, ....
Method: subtraction from scrambled (recall Epstein reading)
Primate brains devote lots of territory to processing information about
the faces of specific individuals. Kanwisher, Tsao
Humans Monkeys
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How does this high sensitivity develop?Studies of infants
Pascalis
familiarize
test
At 9 months, longer looking at the novel face.
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test
Pascalis
familiarization
How does this high sensitivity develop?
Studies of infants
At 9 months, equal looking at the two faces (like adults under most
testing conditions).
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How does this species-specificity develop?
Pascalis
Obvious hypothesis: infants learn to distinguish human faces.
Alternative hypothesis: infants learn notto distinguish monkey
faces.
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How does this species-specificity develop?
Pascalis
9 months
Success
Failure
6 months
Success
Success
Between 6 & 9 months, a narrowing of the face processing domain.By the time they start learning language, children treat (most)
animals as members of kinds (dog, monkey) but treat (most) people
as individuals (Tom, Mary).
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Limits to face perception
Not all creatures with faces, even human faces, are social partners for
the infantsome are strangers: need further cues to determine who
is socially related to them.
Possible cues come from a person's behavior.
Chicks use both behavior and visual appearance to
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Chicks use both behavior and visual appearance to
recognize mom
(M. Johnson & Horn)
2 hours
24 hours
Chicks prefer objects that look like hens:
innate template in chicks.Critical features: head and eyes.
But, in the absence of these features, chicks will imprint to other
objects if they show animate behavior (movement)
Do human infants also identify social partners based on their actions?
Same
species
Diff.
species
Measure = proximity
Eye contact
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Eye contact
(Farroni et al., 2002)
you are engaged
with me.
(Mendelson, 1982)
newborn infants look longer at
the face with direct gaze
so do infant monkeys
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Adult model Infant subject
CameraCoding
monitor
for infant
response
Coding monitor for
adult model
(Meltzoff and Moore, 1977)
Like me? Imitation in newborn infants
imitation
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imitation
(Meltzoff & Moore, 1977)(Ferrari et al., 2006)
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Why imitation?
A reflex? Meltzoff argues no, a meaningful social behavior
--motions are slow and deliberate--motions can happen after a delay (minutes in most studies, days in
one study)
--motions happen only in the presence of the person who initially
performed the action.--motions happen only when the person first looked directly at the
infant.
When one person imitates another, she signals to the other that she is
attending to him and tracking his behavior: a universal social code.
For infants (and adults), imitation may have social meaning for this
reason.
imitation
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imitation
(Meltzoff & Moore, 1977)
I am engaged
with you.
(Ferrari et al., 2006)
more on imitation
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more on imitation
(Meltzoff & Moore, 1977)(Ferrari et al., 2006)
Infants and monkeys prefer social others who imitate them, just
as they prefer others who look at them: a sign of social
engagement.
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Summary
Infants are equipped with multiple ways to identify social others,
recognize them over time (by their faces and actions), share states of
attention with them, and reproduce their actions.
What do we do with these abilities?
--we learn from others (recall section on agency)
--we cooperate with others
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Cooperation
Many human evolutionary biologists, anthopologists and
psychologists argue that the key to our success as a species stems
from our ability to cooperate:
we help one another
we pursue common goals
we share information
by cooperating, we achieve more than any person couldaccomplish alone (hunting big animals, building
shelters, etc etc.)
by sharing information, we learn more than any person could
learn alone.
Key question: What causes this tendency?
An approach: When and do we develop a propensity to collaborate
and help others, and under what conditions do we express it?
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Cooperation
An old idea: Children are selfish; they have to learn to be
cooperative through education and/or slow "socialization".
Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679) Jean Piaget,
egocentrism
Felix Warneken,
Harvard psych.
New findings: Not so:
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Cooperation
Warneken & Tomasello: Children are naturally predisposed bothto
competition and to cooperation. With no rewards, instruction,or even clear requests, they are motivated to
collaborate and cooperate.
Felix Warneken
Experiment 1: child (18 months) andexperimenter play a collaborative game.
Question 1: are young children engaged by
this?
Question 2: if the experimenter stopscollaborating, will the children attempt
to get him to continue?
Acts to restore a mutual game
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Acts to restore a mutual game
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Collaboration
18 month old children collaborate with others.
Collaboration is actively maintained: when the experimenter
breaks off, child actively works to get him back in the game.
These kinds of actions appear in the middle of the second year.
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Helping
In a collaboration, the child and adult have a common goal.
What happens when the adult has a goal that doesnt even
involve the child?
Next experiments: adult attempts to accomplish something andis thwarted. Child (14 or 18 months) watches.
NB: the child isn't involved in the adult's activity.
the adult doesn't ask for help.the adult doesn't reward the child for helping.
Six situations: 3 retrieving out of reach objects; 3 others.
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Case 1: Experimenter drops a clothespin, child = 14 mos.
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Case 2: Exp. fails at stacking books, child = 18 mos.
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How much are they helping?
18 months
14 months
14 mos: retrieving
out of reach objects.
18 mos: almost all
situations tested.
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Cooperation: Summary and Question
By 18 months, children help unrelated adults quite extensively,
without being asked and without rewards.At 14 months, helping is less extensive but does occur.
At younger ages, no such actions have been observed.
Why this development?
Warneken and Tomasello: children are naturally motivated to help
others. They begin helping as they are capable of it.
An alternative: from birth, children observe others being helpful to
them. They learn to do the same by observation and imitation.
To distinguish, need studies of younger infants. But younger infants
don't have the needed behavioral capacities.
A solution: allow young infants to observe acts of helping & test
their evaluations of the helper. (Hamlin, Bloom & Wynn, 2007)
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Infants' evaluations of helpers and hinderers
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Infants' evaluations of helpers and hinderers
test: at 6 months, a different experimenter, blind to condition,
presents the two objects within the infant's reach
test: at 3 months, the two objects appear side by side and looking
is measured.
Infants' evaluations of helpers and hinderers: 6 mos.
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p
control condition: same directions of motion but no animacy
neutral condition: bystander who neither helps nor hinders.
At 6 months, more reaching to helpers than hinderers.
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Infants' evaluations of helpers and hinderers: 3 mos.
At 3 months, longer looking at helpers or bystanders than hinderers.
Do infants understand helping? Are they naturally
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Do infants understand helping? Are they naturally
helpful?
these questions are open: much more work to do.
for 3 month old infants, the study of cooperation is about at the
point of the study of depth perception in Fantz's day.
But as in Fantz's day, psychologists have the tools to find out.
Wow, effortful !
Wow, 3D!
helping and hindering!
moving in same or
opposite directions, or...