The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center cordially invites you
to its talk by
Stephen
Butterfill<http://www.butterfill.com/> (University of Warwick, Department of
Philosophy).
Date: Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - 17:00-18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 St. 7, room 101
The Developmental Origins of Knowledge of Objects: The Systems and Their Signature Limits
What is the nature of infants' earliest abilities to track briefly unperceived
physical objects? And how, over the course of development, do infants get from these early
forms of cognition to knowledge of simple facts about particular physical objects? The
leading, best supported conjecture is that infants' core knowledge of objects consists
in a system of object indexes (Leslie et al. 1998; Scholl and Leslie 1999; Carey and Xu
2001; Scholl 2007). Accepting this conjecture confronts us with two challenges. The first
is to explain a pattern of discrepancies involving multiple measures
(violation-of-expectations vs manual search, for instance) and multiple types of
disappearance (occlusion vs endarkening). The second challenge concerns the interface
between core knowledge and thought. Object indexes have only limited, indirect influences
on thought and action. How then could their operations explain the findings of
violation-of-expectation experiments? And how could they play a role in explaining the
emergence, in development, of knowledge of physical objects? This talk introduces the
challenges and proposes a novel, two-part response. We should recognise that infants,
like adults, sometimes represent objects motorically. Core knowledge is not one thing but
a composite of two things that are, to an interesting degree, independent of each other:
object indexes and motor representations. Further, object indexes can give rise to
metacognitive feelings. The developmental transition from core knowledge of objects to
knowledge proper may have such a protracted developmental course because only
metacognitive feelings connect core knowledge to knowledge proper.
We are looking forward to see you at the talk!
Cognitive Science Events at CEU:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
Social Mind Center Events at CEU:
http://socialmind.ceu.edu/events
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