Readings

SES # TOPICS READINGS
1 Commonsense and cognitive science  
2* Piaget

Buy at Amazon Piaget, Jean. "Piaget's Theory." In Childhood Cognitive Development: The Essential Readings. Edited by Kang Lee. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000, pp. 31–47. ISBN: 9780631216568.

Buy at Amazon Flavell, John H. The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget. With a foreword by Jean Piaget. Van Nostrand Reinhold Inc., 1963, pp. 51–71. ISBN: 9780442024130.

3* Central debates, post-Piaget

Buy at MIT Press Buy at Amazon Gopnik, Alison M., and Andrew N. Meltzoff. "The Scientist as Child." In Words, Thoughts, and Theories. The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 13–47. ISBN: 9780262071758.

Buy at Amazon Chomsky, Noam, and Jerry Fodor. "The Inductivist Fallacy." In Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Edited by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 255–75. ISBN: 9780674509412.

4 Methods 1  
5 Methods 2  
6* Perception

Buy at Amazon Flavell, John H., Patricia H. Miller, and Scott A. Miller. "Infant Cognition." In Cognitive Development. 4th ed. Pearson, 2001, pp. 29–62. ISBN: 9780137915750.

Lewkowicz, David J., and Asif A. Ghazanfar. "The Emergence of Multisensory Systems through Perceptual Narrowing." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, no. 11 (2009): 470–8.

Meltzoff, Andrew N., and Richard W. Borton. "Intermodal Matching by Human Neonates." Nature 282 (1979): 403–4.

7* Object knowledge

Xu, Fei. "Sortal Concepts, Object Individuation, and Language." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 9 (2007): 400–6.

Spelke, Elizabeth S., Karen Breinlinger, et al. This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader."Origins of Knowledge." (PDF - 5.9MB) Psychological Review 99, no. 4 (1992): 605–32.

8* Number

Wynn, Karen. "Addition and Subtraction by Human Infants." Nature 358 (1992): 749–50.

McCrink, Koleen, and Karen Wynn. "Large-number Addition and Subtraction by 9-Month-Old Infants." Psychological Science 15, no. 11 (2004): 776–81.

Feigenson, Lisa, Stanislas Dehaene, et al. "Core Systems of Number." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, no. 7 (2004): 307–14.

9* Statistical learning

Kushnir, Tamar, Fei Xu, et al. "Young Children Use Statistical Sampling to Infer the Preferences of Other People." Psychological Science 21, no. 8 (2010): 1134–40.

Xu, Fei, and Vashti Garcia. "Intuitive Statistics by 8-Month-Old Infants." PNAS 105, no. 13 (2008): 5012–5.

Téglás, Ernő, Edward Vul, et al. "Pure Reasoning in 12-Month-Old Infants as Probabilistic Inference." Science 332, no. 6033 (2011): 1054–9.

10 Topic seminars/CIM workshops: social cognition and brain disorders  
11 Topic seminars/CIM workshops: empathy and morality  
12 Topic seminars/CIM workshops: music cognition, perception, and attention  
13 Topic seminars/CIM workshops: education and learning  
14 Topic seminars/CIM workshops: language, imagination, pretend play, and religion  
15 Poster session groups A/B  
16* Computational models of cognitive development/spatial navigation  
17* Concepts Gelman, Susan A., and Henry M. Wellman. "Insides and Essences: Early Understandings of the Non-obvious." Cognition 38, no. 3 (1991): 213–44.

Buy at Amazon Carey, Susan. "Some Preliminaries." Chapter 1 in The Origins of Concepts. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780199838806. [Preview with Google Books]

18* Causal reasoning

Schulz, Laura. "The Origins of Inquiry: Inductive Inference and Exploration in Early Childhood." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 7 (2012): 382–9.

Saxe, R., and S. Carey. "The Perception of Causality in Infancy." Acta Psychologica 123, no. 1–2 (2006): 144–65.

19* Agents and goals

Gergely, György, and Gergely Csibra. "Teleologial Reasoning in Infancy: The Naïve Theory of Rational Action." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 7 (2003): 287–92.

Buy at MIT Press Buy at Amazon Woodward, Amanda L., Jessica A. Sommerville, and José J. Guajardo. "How Infants make Sense of Intentional Action." In Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. Edited by Bertram F. Malle, Louis J. Moses, and Dare A. Baldwin. The MIT Press, 2001, pp. 149–69. ISBN: 9780262133869. [Preview with Google Books]

20* Theory of mind

Baillargeon, Renée, Rose M. Scott, et al. "False-belief Understanding in Infants." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 3 (2010): 110–8.

Wellman, Henry M., David Cross, et al. "Meta-analysis of Theory of Mind Development: The Truth about False Belief." Child Development 72, no. 3 (2001): 655–84.

Gopnik, Alison. "How we know our Minds: The Illusion of First-person Knowledge of Intentionality." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no. 1 (1993): 1–14.

21* Autism

Elsabbagh, Mayada, and Mark H. Johnson. "Getting Answers from Babies about Autism." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 2 (2010): 81–7.

Senju, Atsushi, Victoria Southgate, et al. "Mindblind Eyes: An Absence of Spontaneous Theory of Mind in Asperger Syndrome." Science 325, no. 5942 (2009): 883–5.

22* Word learning

Waxman, Sandra R., and Susan A. Gelman. "Early Word Learning Entails Reference, not Merely Associations." Trends in Cognitive Science 13, no. 6 (2009): 258–63.

Smith, Linda B., Susan S. Jones, et al. "Object Name Learning Provides On-The-Job Training for Attention." Psychological Science 13, no. 1 (2002): 13–9.

Xu, Fei, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. "Sensitivity to Sampling in Bayesian Word Learning." Developmental Science 10, no. 3 (2007): 288–97.

23* Language

Buy at Amazon Cattell, Ray. "Do We Teach Children to Speak?" Chapter 3 in Children's Language: Consensus and Controversy. Cassell Academic, 2000, pp. 30–43. ISBN: 9780304706815.

Buy at Amazon ———. "Do We Help Children to Speak?" Chapter 7 in Children's Language: Consensus and Controversy. Cassell Academic, 2000, pp. 104–28. ISBN: 9780304706815.

Gertner, Yael, Cynthia Fisher, et al. "Learning Words and Rules: Abstract Knowledge of Word Order in Early Sentence Comprehension." Psychological Science 17, no. 8 (2006): 684–91.

24* Moral reasoning

Killena, Melanie, Kelly Lynn Mulveya, et al. "The Accidental Transgressor: Morally-relevant Theory of Mind." Cognition 119, no. 2 (2011): 197–215.

Hamlin, J. Kiley, Karen Wynn, et al. "Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants." Nature 450 (2007): 557–9.

25* Imagination and pretend play

Taylor, Marjorie, Bridget S. Cartwright, et al. "A Developmental Investigation of Children's Imaginary Companions." Developmental Psychology 29, no. 2 (1993): 276–85.

Buchsbaum, Daphna, Sophie Bridgers, et al. "The Power of Possibility: Casual Learning, Counterfactual Reasoning, and Pretend Play." Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B 367, no. 1599 (2012): 2202–12.

26 Poster session groups C/D  

*Daily mini-lecture session