Concepts Kinds And Cognitive Development

Author : Frank C. Keil
Publisher : Bradford Books
ISBN 13 : 9780262111317
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development written by Frank C. Keil and published by Bradford Books. This book was released on 1989-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages.Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal kinds studies, natural-kinds studies, and studies of fundamental categorical distinctions. He shows that all this evidence, when put together, leads to a better understanding of semantic and conceptual development.The book opens with an analysis of the problems of modeling qualitative changes in conceptual development, investigating how concepts of natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts evolve.The studies on nominal kinds document a powerful and unambiguous developmental pattern indicating a shift from a reliance on global tabulations of characteristic features to what appears to be a small set of defining ones. The studies on natural kinds document an analogous shift toward a core theory instead of simple definition. Both sets of studies are strongly supported by cross cultural data.While these patterns seem to suggest that the young child organizes concepts according to characteristic features, Kell argues that there is a framework of conceptual categories and causal beliefs that enables even very young children to understand kinds at a deeper, theoretically guided, level. This account suggests a new way of understanding qualitative change and carries strong implications for how concepts are represented at any point in development.Frank Keil is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Co Director of the Cognitive Studies Program at Cornell. Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development is included in the series Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change. A Bradford Book.

Author : Frank C. Keil
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262610766
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development written by Frank C. Keil and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992-01-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank C. Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages. Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal kinds studies, natural-kinds studies, and studies of fundamental categorical distinctions. He shows that all this evidence, when put together, leads to a better understanding of semantic and conceptual development. The book opens with an analysis of the problems of modeling qualitative changes in conceptual development, investigating how concepts of natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts evolve. The studies on nominal kinds document a powerful and unambiguous developmental pattern indicating a shift from a reliance on global tabulations of characteristic features to what appears to be a small set of defining ones. The studies on natural kinds document an analogous shift toward a core theory instead of simple definition. Both sets of studies are strongly supported by cross cultural data. While these patterns seem to suggest that the young child organizes concepts according to characteristic features, Keil argues that there is a framework of conceptual categories and causal beliefs that enables even very young children to understand kinds at a deeper, theoretically guided, level. This account suggests a new way of understanding qualitative change and carries strong implications for how concepts are represented at any point in development. A Bradford Book

Author : Gregory Murphy
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262632993
Total Pages : 564 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Big Book of Concepts written by Gregory Murphy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-01-30 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex. Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.

Author : Susan Carey
Publisher : Oxford Series in Cognitive Dev
ISBN 13 : 0199838801
Total Pages : 609 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Origin of Concepts written by Susan Carey and published by Oxford Series in Cognitive Dev. This book was released on 2011 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of children's cognitive development.

Author : Ulric Neisser
Publisher : CUP Archive
ISBN 13 : 9780521378758
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Concepts and Conceptual Development written by Ulric Neisser and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1989-03-31 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concepts and Conceptual Development draws together a wide range of theorists to consider many different aspects of 'the psychology of concepts'.

Author : David Barner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190467649
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change written by David Barner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We acquire concepts such as "atom," "force," "integer," and "democracy" long after we are born; these concepts are not part of the initial cognitive state of human beings. Other concepts like "object," "cause," or "agent" may be present early in infancy--if not innately. Processes of change occur throughout our conceptual development, which prompts two key questions: Which human concepts constitute innate, core knowledge? How do humans acquire new concepts, and how do these concepts change in development? Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change provides a unique theoretical and empirical introduction to the study of conceptual development, documenting key advances in case studies, including ground-breaking science on human representations of language, objects, number, events, color, space, time, beliefs, and desires. Additionally, it explores how humans engage in moral reasoning and causal explanation: Are humans born good and tainted by an imperfect world, or do we need to teach children to be moral? Could a concept like "freedom" be woven into the human soul, or is it a historical invention, constructed over generations of humans? Written by an eminent list of contributors renowned in child development and cognitive science, this book delves widely, and deeply, into the cognitive tools available at birth that are repurposed, combined, and transformed to complex, abstract adult conceptual representations, and should be of interest to developmental psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and students of cognitive science.

Author : Ellin Kofsky Scholnick
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 1135686920
Total Pages : 387 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conceptual Development written by Ellin Kofsky Scholnick and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a key issue in current cognitive theories - the nature of representation. Each chapter is characterized by attempts to frame hot topics in cognitive development within the landscape of current developmental theorizing and the past legacy of genetic epistemology. The chapters address four questions that are fundamental to any developmental line of inquiry: How should we represent the workings and contents of the mind? How does the child construct mental models during the course of development? What are the origins of these models? and What accounts for the novelties that are the products and producers of developmental change? These questions are situated in a historical context, Piagetian theory, and contemporary researchers attempt to trace how they draw upon, depart from, and transform the Piagetian legacy to revisit classic issues such as the child's awareness of the workings of mental life, the child's ability to represent the world, and the child's growing ability to process and learn from experience. The theoretical perspectives covered include constructivism, connectionism, theory-theory, information processing, dynamical systems, and social constructivist approaches. The research areas span imitation, mathematical reasoning, biological knowledge, language development, and theory of mind. Written by major contributors to the field, this work will be of interest to students and researchers wanting a brief but in-depth overview of the contemporary field of cognitive development.

Author : David H. Rakison
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190286598
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Category and Concept Development written by David H. Rakison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether or not infants' earliest perception of the world is a "blooming, buzzing, confusion," it is not long before they come to perceive structure and order among the objects and events around them. At the core of this process, and cognitive development in general, is the ability to categorize--to group events, objects, or properties together--and to form mental representations, or concepts, that encapsulate the commonalities and structure of these categories. Categorization is the primary means of coding experience, underlying not only perceptual and reasoning processes, but also inductive inference and language. The aim of this book is to bring together the most recent findings and theories about the origins and early development of categorization and conceptual abilities. Despite recent advances in our understanding of this area, a number of hotly debated issues remain at the center of the controversy over categorization. Researchers continue to ask questions such as: Which mechanisms for categorization are available at birth and which emerge later? What are the relative roles of perceptual similarity and nonobservable properties in early classification? What is the role of contextual variation in categorization by infants and children? Do different experimental procedures reveal the same kind of knowledge? Can computational models simulate infant and child categorization? How do computational models inform behavioral research? What is the impact of language on category development? How does language partition the world? This book is the first to address these and other key questions within a single volume. The authors present a diverse set of views representing cutting-edge empirical and theoretical advances in the field. The result is a thorough review of empirical contributions to the literature, and a wealth of fresh theoretical perspectives on early categorization.

Author : Jean Matter Mandler
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198038399
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Foundations of Mind written by Jean Matter Mandler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-06 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Foundations of Mind, Jean Mandler presents a new theory of cognitive development in infancy, focusing on the processes through which perceptual information is transformed into concepts. Drawing on her extensive research, Mandler explores preverbal conceptualization and shows how it forms the basis for both thought and language. She also emphasizes the importance of distinguishing automatic perceptual processes from attentive conceptualization, and argues that these two kinds of learning follow different principles, so it is crucial to specify the processes required by a given task. Countering both strong nativist and empiricist views, Mandler provides a fresh and markedly different perspective on early cognitive development, painting a new picture of the abilities and accomplishments of infants and the development of the mind.

Author : Melissa Bowerman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521593588
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development written by Melissa Bowerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-11 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development.