Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal最新文献

A substantial body of work has examined the gestures children and adults make when they talk and found them to be a revealing window on the processes of cognitive change. In her paper, Susan Wagner Cook (this volume) reviews this work along with her own recent work examining the gestures children and adults produce when they talk about math. She argues that the combined data point to a new view of our mathematical knowledge as embodied. Here I comment on Cook's arguments, highlighting how this view of math as embodied offers new insights for our understanding of classic developmental themes, in particular, the continuity versus discontinuity dichotomy. In addition, I present a brief summary of recent work on how children use their bodies in another realm typically thought of as abstract-understanding referential intent. I present an embodied account of how children disambiguate speaker intent in novel naming situations and argue that, as in the case of embodied math, an embodied view of cognition can help elucidate developmental mechanism.

Actions influence perceptions, but how this occurs may change across the lifespan. Studies have investigated how object-directed actions (e.g., learning about objects through manipulation) affect subsequent perception, but how abstract actions affect perception, and how this may change across development, have not been well studied. In the present study, we address this question, teaching children (4-7 year-olds) and adults sung melodies, with or without an abstract motor component, and using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to determine how these melodies are subsequently processed. Results demonstrated developmental change in the motor cortices and Middle Temporal Gyrus. Results have implications for understanding sensori-motor integration in the developing brain, and may provide insight into motor learning use in some music education techniques.

Over the years observational studies have made great progress in characterizing children's visual experiences and their sensitivity to social cues and their role in language development. Recent technological advancements have allowed researchers to study these issues from the child's perspective, leading to a new understanding of the dynamic involvement of bodily events. A number of recent studies have suggested that bodily actions play an important role in perception and that social partners' bodily actions may become synchronized. In the present perspective paper, we will provide a new perspective on how children's own views are generated individually and play a dynamic role in learning. By doing so, we first discuss the role of early social input in language learning as it has been treated in the literature and then introduce recent studies in which typically developing hearing children, deaf children of deaf families, and children with autism were observed in a social context using the new child-centered technology. The hypothesis of a link between sensorimotor experiences and embodied attention - specifically how different bodies produce different kinds of attention - will be discussed. Understanding the role of bodily events (the child's and the child's social partners') in early visual experiences will provide insight into the development of learning mechanisms and the processes involved in learning disabilities.

Previous research shows that sensory and motor systems interact during verb perception, and that these interactions are formed through self-generated actions that refer to verb labels during development. Here we expand on these findings by investigating whether self-generated actions lead to sensori-motor interaction during sound perception and visual perception. The current research exposes young children to novel sounds that are produced by object movement through either a) actively exploring the objects and producing the sounds or b) by seeing and hearing an experimenter interact with the objects. Results demonstrate that the motor system was recruited during auditory perception only after learning involved self-generated interactions with objects. Interestingly, visual association regions were also active during both sound perception and visual perception after active exploratory learning, but not after passive observation. Therefore, in the developing brain, associations are built upon real-world interactions of body and environment, leading to sensori-motor representations of both objects and sounds.

The second year of life marks the beginning of empathic responsiveness to others' distress, a hallmark of human interaction. We examined the role of social understanding (self-other understanding and emotion understanding) and empathic disposition in individual differences in 12- to 24-month olds' responses to mothers' and an unfamiliar infant peer's distress (N = 71). Results reveal associations between empathic responsiveness to distressed mother and crying infant peer, suggesting that individual differences in prosocial motivation may exist right from the outset, when the ability to generate an empathic, prosocial response first emerges. We further found that above and beyond such dispositional characteristics (and age), children with more advanced social understanding were more empathically responsive to a peer's distress. However, responses to mothers' distress were explained by children's empathic disposition only, and not by their social understanding. Thus, as early as the second year of life some children are dispositionally more inclined to empathy regardless of who is in distress, whether mother or peer. At the same time, emotion understanding and self-other understanding appear to be especially important for explaining individual differences in young children's empathic responsiveness to a peer's distress.