Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T03:52:02.176Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A unified account of abstract structure and conceptual change: Probabilistic models and early learning mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2011

Alison Gopnik
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720. [email protected]

Abstract

We need not propose, as Carey does, a radical discontinuity between core cognition, which is responsible for abstract structure, and language and “Quinian bootstrapping,” which are responsible for learning and conceptual change. From a probabilistic models view, conceptual structure and learning reflect the same principles, and they are both in place from the beginning.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Carey, S. (2009) The origin of concepts. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, N. D., Ullman, T. D. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2011) Learning a theory of causality. Psychological Review 118(1):110–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gopnik, A., Glymour, C., Sobel, D., Schulz, L., Kushnir, T. & Danks, D. (2004) A theory of causal learning in children: Causal maps and Bayes nets. Psychological Review 111(1):132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gopnik, A. & Schulz, L., eds. (2007) Causal learning: Philosophy, psychology and computation. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graf Estes, K., Alibali, M. W., Evans, J. L. & Saffran, J. R. (2007) Can infants map meaning to newly segmented words? Statistical segmentation and word learning. Psychological Science 18(3):254–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Griffiths, T., Chater, N., Kemp, C., Perfors, A. & Tenenbaum, J. (2010) Probabilistic models of cognition: Exploring representations and inductive biases. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14(8):357–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Inagaki, K. & Hatano, G. (2004) Vitalistic causality in young children's naïve biology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(8):356–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kushnir, T., Xu, F. & Wellman, H. (2010) Young children use statistical sampling to infer the preferences of others. Psychological Science 21:1134–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lany, J. & Saffran, J. (2010) From statistics to meaning: Infants' acquisition of lexical categories. Psychological Science 21(2):284–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lucas, C., Gopnik, A. & Griffiths, T. (2010) Developmental differences in learning the form of causal relationships. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. Ohlsson, S. & Catrambone, R., pp. 2852–57. Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Meltzoff, A. & Brooks, R. (2008) Self-experience as a mechanism for learning about others. Developmental Psychology 44(5):1257–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schulz, L. E. & Bonawitz, E. B. (2007) Serious fun: Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded. Developmental Psychology 43:1045–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schulz, L., Goodman, N., Tenenbaum, J. & Jenkins, A. (2008) Going beyond the evidence: Abstract laws and preschoolers' responses to anomalous data. Cognition 109(2):211–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seiver, E., Gopnik, A. & Goodman, N. (under review) Did she jump because she was brave or because the trampoline was safe? Causal inference and the development of social cognition.Google Scholar
Somerville, J., Woodward, A. & Needham, A. (2005) Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions. Cognition 96:111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tenenbaum, J., Griffiths, T. & Nioyogi, S. (2007) Intuitive theories as grammars for causal inference. In: Causal learning: Philosophy, psychology and computation, ed. Gopnik, A. & Schulz, L., Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wang, S. & Baillargeon, R. (2008) Can infants be “taught” to attend to a new physical variable in an event category? The case of height in covering events. Cognitive Psychology 56(4):284326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wellman, H. & Liu, D. (2007) Causal reasoning as informed by the early development of explanations. In: Causal learning: Philosophy, psychology and computation, ed. Gopnik, A. & Schulz, L., pp. 261–79. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodward, A. & Needham, A. (2009) Learning and the infant mind. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Xu, F. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2007) Word learning as Bayesian inference. Psychological Review 114:245–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed