CURRENT TOPICS IN CHILDREN'S LEARNING AND COGNITION Edited by Heidi Kloos, Bradley J. Morris and Joseph L. Amaral Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/1162 Edited by Heidi Kloos, Bradley J. Morris and Joseph L. Amaral Contributors Ana Flávia Lopes Magela Gerhardt, Steffie Van der Steen, Henderien Steenbeek, Paul Van Geert, Heidi Kloos, Heather Baker, Eleanor Luken, Rhonda Brown, David Pfeiffer, Victoria Carr, Bradley J. Morris, Steve Croker, Amy M. Masnick, Corinne Zimmerman, Daisy A. Segovia, Angela M. Crossman, Joseph L. Amaral, Susan Collins, Kevin T. Bohache, Mieczyslaw Pokorski, Lukasz Borecki, Urszula Jernajczyk, Kevin Downing Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2012 InTech All chapters are Open Access distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. Any republication, referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source. Notice Statements and opinions expressed in the chapters are these of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. 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ISBN 978-953-51-0855-9 Contents Preface VII Chapter 1 Learning in Cognitive Niches 1 Ana Flávia Lopes Magela Gerhardt Chapter 2 Using the Dynamics of a Person-Context System to Describe Children’s Understanding of Air Pressure 21 Steffie Van der Steen, Henderien Steenbeek and Paul Van Geert Chapter 3 Preschoolers Learning Science: Myth or Reality? 45 Heidi Kloos, Heather Baker, Eleanor Luken, Rhonda Brown, David Pfeiffer and Victoria Carr Chapter 4 The Emergence of Scientific Reasoning 61 Bradley J. Morris, Steve Croker, Amy M. Masnick and Corinne Zimmerman Chapter 5 Cognition and the Child Witness: Understanding the Impact of Cognitive Development in Forensic Contexts 83 Daisy A. Segovia and Angela M. Crossman Chapter 6 Beyond the Black-and-White of Autism: How Cognitive Performance Varies with Context 105 Joseph L. Amaral, Susan Collins, Kevin T. Bohache and Heidi Kloos Chapter 7 Psychological Fitness in Young Adult Video Game Players 123 Mieczyslaw Pokorski, Lukasz Borecki and Urszula Jernajczyk Chapter 8 The Impact of Moving Away from Home on Undergraduate Metacognitive Development 137 Kevin Downing Preface How does a child make sense of her world? Every day, children are exposed to a plethora of stimulation, only little of which has apparent structure. Take visual stimulation, for example: With every motion of the eyes, the head, or the body, the retinal image changes – at least to some extent. Add to that the changes in apparent size and orientation due to object motion, changes in lightening, and changes that occur though the actions of others Yet, even babies learn to perceive stabilities in the environment, learn to make predictions about their surroundings, and learn to control situations through their own actions. At the center of this impressive feat is a child’s ability to connect separate pieces of information into larger wholes. The resulting pattern of Gestalt makes it possible for children to distinguish relevant from irrelevant stimulation, and as a result, ignore stimulation that is potentially overwhelming. In short, it allows children to make sense of their surrounding (cf., Thagard, 2000). The mental process of linking isolated events into overarching patterns of Gestalts, despite appearing trivial on some levels, is not well understood. How do children connect individual events spontaneously without any top-down guidance? How does the rate of linking events change over the course of development? And how is it possible to tune out some stimulation, while still being open to that which yields learning and development? These are only some of the many questions in the area of children’s learning and cognition that have eluded a clear answer. This difficulty in generating a clear answer has its roots both in theory and empirical data. On the theoretical level, the area of cognitive development has experienced something of a vacuum, ever since Piaget’s stage theory was challenged. Challenges pertained not only to the specific time course of concept development (e.g., underestimating infant abilities), but also to having to explain substantial performance variability as a function of seemingly irrelevant task details. Other mainstream theories did not fare much better in terms of shedding light on how children make sense of their surrounding. This is because they traced the emergence of a knowledge organization to the presence of some already existing knowledge (cf., Spelke et al., 1992), leading to an infinite regress of explanations (cf., Juarrero, 1999). A more complete theory of learning and cognitive development would have to explain the emergence of a knowledge Gestalt without reducing it to yet another knowledge Gestalt. Such theories, geared towards explaining self-organization of coherent patterns (e.g., Jensen, 1998), provide promising tools for developmental scientists to investigate the dynamic processes underlying cognition and VIII Preface learning (cf., e.g., Stephen et al., 2009; Thelen & Smith, 1994). However, they have not found their way into mainstream cognitive development (e.g., Siegler, 1998). In addition to lacking a powerful theory on children’s learning and cognition, progress in understanding children’s sense-making has been slow due to issues with empirical data. Data collection with children is more time consuming and expensive than with adults. And methods are limited by children’s interest, competence, attention span, and willingness to follow instructions. These factors are at least partially responsible for the fact that far more publications merely document the time course of a child’s concept, not the nature of processes that give rise to these concepts. Given this state of affairs, the topic on children’s learning and cognition is still in its beginnings, leading to the collection of essays published in this volume. As a whole, the essays address theoretical and empirical issues related to children’s learning and cognition. The first essay, titled Learning in Cognitive Niches, treats the process of sense making on a theoretical level, discussing the complexity of factors that give rise to children’s learning. It is followed by an essay, titled Using the Dynamics of a Person-Context System to Describe Children’s Understanding of Air Pressure, that applies ideas from complexity science and dynamics-systems theory to children’s learning about science. The next four essays summarize and synthesize already published findings, in an effort to go beyond individual viewpoints and present a more nuanced picture of children’s sense making. In particular, two of these summaries, Preschoolers Learning Science: Myth or Reality? and The Emergence of Scientific Reasoning, focus on children’s ability to make sense of their physical environment. The essay Cognition and the Child Witness: Understanding the Impact of Cognitive Development in Forensic Contexts seeks to shed light on children’s sense making relevant to forensic issues. And the essay Beyond the Black-and-White of Autism: How Cognitive Performance Varies with Context ventures in the area of autism, a disorder that demonstrates atypical processes of combining pieces of information. The final two essays provide original data to add to the discussion of what factors affect cognitive functioning. In particular, the essay Cognitive Fitness in Young Adult Video Game Players seeks to re-assess the often-assumed relation between video gaming and various aspects of thinking, memory, intelligence, and visual-spatial abilities. And the essay Impact of Moving Away from Home on Undergraduate Metacognitive Development explicitly connects life circumstances to the ability to monitor and control one’s thinking. Together, the collection of essays are a further step towards understanding the process of sense making as children and young adults interact with their environment. Heidi Kloos Department of Psychology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati OH, USA Bradley J. Morris Kent State University, USA Joseph L. Amaral University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA Preface IX Cited References Jensen H.J. (1998). Self-Organized Criticality. Emergent Complex Behavior in Physical and Biological Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Juarrero A. (1999). Dnamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. MIT Press, Cambridge. Siegler, R. S. (1998). Children’s thinking (3rd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Spelke, E. S., Breinlinger, K., Macomber, J. & Jacobson, K. (1992). Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review, 99, 605–32. Stephen, D. G., Dixon, J. A., & Isenhower, R. W. (2009). Dynamics of representational change: Entropy, action, and cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 35, 1811-1822. Thagard, P. (2000). Coherence in thought and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thelen E. and Smith L.B. (1994). A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. [...]... phylogenetic basis for constructing and understanding cognitive behaviours related to specific settings for pedagogical actions (Premack and Premack, 1996; Csibra and Gergely, 2006) These studies favour the definition of the proper nature of pedagogy and teaching and learning actions as cognitive systems So all people involved in teaching and learning activities are operating cognitively in a way which is specific... Articulating this account to studies on cognition and learning can bring to light several phenomena and also expand our notion about learning, as this action allows us to define Learning in Cognitive Niches 7 with more accuracy what components are desirable and what variables must be observed for a learning task to be accomplished The definition of the classroom as a cognitive niche, taking into account... deliver some ideas about learning in institutional environments, from the perspective that human cognition operates and develops itself in a distributed fashion, and within the scope of cognitive niches Taking this premise into account, discussing how learning occurs in the cognitive niches, and defining the classroom as an essential locus where this operation takes place, means taking into consideration... especially important, as understanding involves deep knowledge of concepts, and the active manipulation of this knowledge in the form of explaining, predicting, applying, and generalizing (Perkins & Blythe, 1994) A model of understanding can give guidance to both researchers and educators dealing with children’s understanding and the development of their understanding In this chapter, we will present such... teacher in science class), each step in understanding is based on the previous step in understanding, while on the long term each interaction builds on the preceding interaction (e.g the interaction during last week’s science class) In this way, the same mechanisms are sculpting the development of understanding over a shorter and longer period Thelen and Corbetta (2002) indicate that the general principles... institutionalized learning and meaning construction (Walkerdine, 1988; McDermott, 1993; Lave, 1993; Sinha, 1999, among many others) In this chapter we are focusing on the cognitive niche as a setting constructed through a dynamics related to the understanding and engagement in interactions wherein intersubjectivity negotiations, normative crossings and possibilities of re-semiotization to solve problems of meaning... 1537–1554 Sinha, C (2010) Languages, culture and mind: ten lectures on development, evolution and cognitive linguistics Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press Sinha, C., and Rodriguez, C (2008) Language and the Signifying object: from convention to imagination In: J Zlatev, T Racine, C Sinha & E Itkonen (Eds) The Shared Mind: Perspectives on intersubjectivity Amsterdam: John Benjamins, p... boundaries between internal and external representations and domains of experience, and generate new prospects for the view of what cognition is: no longer biased to the internal or the external 4 Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition factors which compose it, but requiring mutual and constitutive relationships between these domains (Zhang and Patel, 2006; Franks, 2011), which are evinced through... understanding of the concept at issue (for instance, the flow of air through two syringes connected by a tube), is the child's continuously changing state of mind, or stream of consciousness, as he picks up and reacts to whatever goes on in the current dynamic interaction Thus, despite the fact that the process of constructing an understanding is a distributed process, involving the intertwining of... action of the child has an influence on the subsequent (re-)action In other words, the existing understanding is the basis for the emergence of the next understanding as it develops in the interaction 26 Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition In its simplest possible form, a dynamic systems model specifies the change in a variable (L) over time (t) as a function of the current level of the . CURRENT TOPICS IN CHILDREN'S LEARNING AND COGNITION Edited by Heidi Kloos, Bradley J. Morris and Joseph L. Amaral Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition. Articulating this account to studies on cognition and learning can bring to light several phenomena and also expand our notion about learning, as this action allows us to define Learning in Cognitive. representations and domains of experience, and generate new prospects for the view of what cognition is: no longer biased to the internal or the external Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition