Invited symposium
Chairs: Patricia J. Bauer and Nancy L. Stein
Discussants: Nancy L. Stein and Patricia J. Bauer
For the past three decades, Dr. Jean M. Mandler has been a driving force in cognitive and developmental science. This symposium represents our desire to honor Dr. Mandler's contributions to the field as she prepares to retire from the everyday activities of academic psychology. Dr. Mandler began as a 'rat runner' until she had a change of heart and an introduction to the world of developmental psychology. She plunged into development and cognition by focusing on the representation, organization, and accuracy of visual memory. She went on to develop a theory of story and event representation, and then expanded her work to include studies of categorization and conceptual development in infants and toddlers. Throughout her career, she has maintained the orientation of a comparative psychologist, exploring memory, learning, thinking, and cognitive capabilities in non-human animals, adults of our species, and the most challenging organisms of all, human infants and young children. To her, each population yielded novel insights which, through her unique perspective and exceptional analyses, were fashioned into core ideas that influenced greatly the study of developmental and cognitive science. It is Jean Mandler's work over the past decade for which the International Society on Infant Studies knows her the best. In this time, Dr. Mandler has been a major contributor to a remarkable revolution in the way we conceive of mental life in the human infant. Through her work on categorization, concept development, and memory, Jean Mandler has charted the course of development of representational abilities from their most humble beginnings. Equally important, she has stimulated empirical research and has served as the catalyst for theoretical advances in her many colleagues. This symposium features three excellent examples in the form of research on early conceptual development, relations between early conceptual development and early language development, and applications of the study of normative representational development to the specific developmental disorders of Williams syndrome and Down's syndrome. In each case, it is clear that Jean Mandler's empirical and theoretical work has been of significant influence. It has advanced our conceptualization of developmental processes in general and representational issues in particular. In this symposium we will celebrate Jean M. Mandler's career and her many accomplishments.
Details of individual items:
paper
The traditional view that infants' early conceptualizations of the world underlie and support early language acquisition is not as straightforward as researchers had initially hoped. For example, recent research by Mandler and McDonough has shown that infants do not learn about the world by making context specific associations; rather, infants are flexible in accessing and exploiting prior knowledge to deal with novel situations. For example, infants make inductive generalizations that animals drink (even anteaters and fish) and that keys are used with vehicles (even forklifts and airplanes). Yet, infants also over-generalize activities specific to basic-level categories. For example, on being shown a rabbit eating a carrot, infants will generalize the eating of the carrot to a bird as often as to another rabbit. This pattern of overgeneralization is also found when other basic level properties are tested (e.g., properties specific to cars, trees, and beds). These results suggest that infants understand events in a general way. That is, in the example of the rabbit eating the carrot, they comprehend eating in general but they have yet to understand which kinds of food are appropriate for which kinds of animals. Yet, when infants are first acquiring language, they hear something like 'Feed the rabbit a carrot.' They typically do not hear 'Feed the animal some food.' Do the general meanings that guide inferences about the relations among actions and objects mirror the same meanings that guide language acquisition? Two areas of research, one in which infants' comprehension of basic level nouns is tested and the other in which nonverbal and verbal categorization of spatial categories in two languages is compared, will be discussed. Current theories propose that first words are generalized on the basis of shape similarity; however, the results of recent data suggest that first words are over-generalized on the basis of kind, not shape per se. That is, infants over-generalize basic level nouns in the same manner they over-generalize basic level properties. The second area of research examines the way spatial categories differ among various languages. Because of cross-linguistic differences, it is commonly believed that language teaches children to categorize such relations. However, recent data indicates that preverbal infants categorize various spatial relations, even those not in the language they will learn. Yet, at around two years of age, they tend to extend spatial terms appropriately. Additional data show that adults who speak either English or Korean perform poorly on both nonverbal and verbal tasks in which a distinction that is not salient in their native language (but salient in another language they have not learned) is tested. The results suggest that the influence of language is twofold: to aid in the differentiation process of basic level categories, and to pick which concepts are to become part of the verbal repertoire. The concepts that are lexicalized will then continue to influence (but not constrain) how the world is conceptualized throughout adulthood.
paper
Jean Mandler's contribution to our understanding of categories, schemas and memory organization in infants, children and adults extends over a quarter-century, and includes both empirical and theoretical advances. Her recent work on concepts and categories in infancy brings out in new form some old questions about the relation of perceptual and conceptual categorization and of the relation of function to concept formation in general. This work has provided an important reconciliation of conflicting data, and contributes to our theoretical understanding the development of thought in the early years of life. This paper will connect these empirical findings and theoretical conclusions to issues that have been controversial over the past 25 years, especially issues of function and form, the nature of hierarchical category structure and its relation to schematic structure in development, and the relation of concepts and taxonomic categories to children's words and word meanings. I will compare the present state of the art as manifest in Mandler's recent articles with research from the 1970's and will show both convergence and divergence over this time period. The current state of these issues will be reviewed and Mandler's theoretical position will be contrasted with some other contemporary work (e.g., Smith, Landau & Jones). These perspectives will be evaluated in terms of their promise for future research, and connections to developments during the word learning period that follows the infant categorization period. My present perspective on processes of functional differentiation and slot-filler hierarchical organization will be discussed in this connection and related to Mandler's current theorizing with the goal of achieving an integrated concensus position
paper
Jean Mandler has stressed how crucial it is to understand the representations that are progressively build up during infancy and that underlie subsequent development. Yet much of the work on developmental disorders focuses on middle childhood and beyond, and ignores the importance of understanding infant precursors. In this talk I will focus on infants from two developmental disorders--Williams syndrome and Down's syndrome--and show how one cannot derive the infant pattern of strengths and weaknesses from the pattern of strengths and weaknesses in the phenotypic outcome in middle childhood and adulthood. In some cases the representations that underlie subsequent development in a domain are inadequate in infancy. By contrast, in other cases the infant representational precursors seem to have developed normally, but it is the subsequent process of learning that goes awry.