Conventionality across domains in cognitive development
Wednesday, 26 March 2008, 08:00 to 4:30 pm
Westin Bayshore, Bayshore Ballroom - Salon E
$25 fee (by invitation only)

Organizer & contact: Deborah Siegel, dsiegel@ucsc.edu
Event site:  http://cogsci.wisc.edu/convention/

 
The ability to establish and follow social conventions is a unique and important hallmark of human society. Social conventions facilitate the coordination of cooperative action, thought, and communication. By adhering to or flouting conventions, individuals mark their membership and status within a given social group or institution. Intriguingly, some research suggests that even very young infants are sensitive to certain aspects of conventions (such as language). However, a full characterization of infants’ and older children’s abilities has been difficult because little theoretical or empirical work has targeted the nature of the learning problem that conventional knowledge poses. Similarly, little is known about the settings within which children might be required to act (or think) in a preferred conventional manner (see Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007).

Nonetheless, a number of developmental psychologists have begun to address the extent to which social conventions must play a role in guiding children’s developing competence across a variety of domains including language, categorization, tool use and play. The goal of this pre-conference is to bring these researchers together to identify commonalities and differences in our approach to the “conventionality framework.” In particular, we hope that we can leverage the differences in our content domains to hone in on the common learning problem conventional knowledge poses. More generally, we hope that this discussion, will lay the foundation for a broader, integrative framework that has the potential to highlight the ways in which these rather diverse content domains might be related in cognitive development. To achieve this goal, we would like to invite contributors to a recent edited volume examining conventionality in cognitive development (Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007) in addition to other developmental psychologists who have worked on the problems of defining of conventionality and its development across a number of content domains. We hope that this pre-conference will contribute to our understanding the ontogeny of conventional understanding.