[SOUND] How do we learn control? Well one of the theories that has best handled the development of control was developed by Jean Piaget. Piaget, is in essence, the founder of developmental psychology, was a zoologist trained essentially to work with animals, and he took many of these ideas and brought them over to development. Piaget was criticized because he suggested that humans had very basic reflexes. They could grasp things at birth, they had a startle reflex, a walking reflex. And that through this very complex process of adaptation, eventually what would happen is that humans would show very complex forms of cognition. The problem is that people began to find that human infants could do all kinds of things at birth. They could recognize faces. They would track a face just minutes after being born. They might have a bias towards their native language sound. Doesn't mean they can't recognize sounds from other languages, but they had a bias towards their native language. Some people even propose that they had very basic information about physics, at birth. And so this huge wave of research came out suggesting that word Piaget was wrong. There all these things that are innate. And he suggested we only had a few reflexes. And It's true Piaget had limitations in the methodology that he used and the way that he evaluated what human infants knew. And since then there have been development of very sophisticated methods to figure out what human infants know and at what age they know it. But it's the flavor of Piaget's theory that I think is most important. Not so much the specific details about very specific stages, but rather how he saw development occur. His view was that sensorimotor processing occurred earliest in life, about the first two years of life roughly. Then a transition into symbolic processing, what's called concrete operations. And then finally a transition into formal operations. One of Piaget's most famous findings has to do with object permanence. Right? In this task, a human infant is placed in front of a toy. The toy is in plain site, and the infant will interact with the toy, look at it, point at it. Then the toy's covered and the infant essentially looks away. Out of sight, out of mind. I experienced this actually during the first year of life when my daughter, Kiara, the oldest stayed at home and I would stay at home on Fridays and work. And so I would be working, you know in the room and then I would come out and she'd be with the babysitter, and I would play with her for, you know, a few minutes, 15, 20 minutes, and then when I walked away, she'd continue playing with the babysitter. But, eventually, I realized that things were changing. Because one day I went to play with her, just like I had always before, and then she started calling out to me. So I had to go back, and then I realized I had to go back and back and back again and suddenly even though I was leaving I wasn't out of sight anymore. And even when I was in the room, right, she might come and knock on the door or try to come in. So she was looking for me. She knew that I existed even though I wasn't in front of her. And the same thing with my youngest daughter Camille. She'd oftentimes be walking through the house looking for us like where's mommy. So she'd go to the laundry room. She wouldn't see mommy. Then she'd go off into the you know, I don't know guest room then mommy wasn't there. She'd go into our room. Mommy wasn't there. And she'd be looking around and she knew that mommy existed even though mommy wasn't right in front of her. And all normally developing human infants have this ability. A few years ago, Shinskey and Munakata wanted to ask why is it that infants can't see this hidden toy? So they took six and a half month olds. And they replicated Piaget's effect. So they put a toy in front of the infant, they covered the toy, and they found that when the toy was in plain sight, the infant could recognize and see the toy, and when it was covered, the infant would no longer look at it. Then they did something very interesting. They decided that they would adapt the paradigm a bit, and have the infant reach for the toy, and see if the infant continued to reach in the same location when it was covered. And they found that the infant when it was covered would not reach for the toy but if they turned the lights off, so they had the toy in plain sight and they turned the lights off and you say whoa, a six and a half month old turned the lights off, doesn't that scare them? Well they're six and a half months old so they don't get scared by the lights being off. And in fact what they found was that the infant would reach for the toy when the lights were off but not when the lights were on and the toy was covered. Now think about that for a minute. Infants were reaching for a toy that they could not see, but only when the lights were off. So in both conditions, they cannot see the toy, the infant is not able to see the toy. And yet when the lights are off, the infant will reach for it. Why would this be? Well if we think about the world, the world in essence its like a big distracter. It gets in the way of what we're trying to kind in our mind. When the lights are off, then the infant doesn't have the world distracting him or her. And is able to represent, right, to present again to themselves the toy, and that's because there's nothing to interfere with that. There's only the image in their mind of the toy. There's no image out in the world that distracts them. The ability to do two things at once, is perhaps something that more and more humans have to do daily. So let's say you have a very important appointment. And you want to dress. It's a job interview. So you're, you're having to you know, iron things get everything ready. You're a little bit more nervous than normal. And as you're about to go out the door you remember that you have to take your appointment book. So you go back to your office and as you get to your office and you're reaching for the appointment book some, the phone rings. So you answer the phone, you talk to them quickly because you have to go, you hang up the phone, you walk out of the room, you're back at the front door, and then you say oh, the appointment book. Why did that happen? Well it happened because you were about to reach for the appointment book, and something else came in and interrupted you and took your attention. It took your processing resources, and so therefore you have forgotten about the reason you went to the room originally. It's a similar thing when we think about the world with infants. For them the world is a big distracter, and trying to keep things in mind that are not in the world becomes difficult work. Just like it is for adults who go to get an appointment book and get a phone call. Keeping the appointment book in mind when the phone is taking up their attention is difficult. So what do we do to keep things in mind. We can create checklists. We can write things in an agenda. And the use of written language, and of language itself, allows us to represent things in a very efficient manner that are not in front of us. The use of symbols is also a hallmark of development. We can see it in the use of language. Suddenly, an infant doesn't have to do things, grab things, point at things, they can use language. They can say, mommy milk. And it becomes immediately clear to mommy what they want. And that is very powerful because it allows them to now represent the world in a different way, without having to point, without having to grab, without having to pantomime but actually by using words. These early years of development are marked by dizzying changes. They seem to happen almost daily, weekly. Children learn new words, they do new things. There's this explosion of cognition. One of the interesting things that my advisor used to do was to ask children about conditionals. Conditionals are interesting because they require people to think about something that's not true or that could be true. So they might say things like well what if the moon was made out of bread? And children were fine, they'd say okay well if the moon was made out of bread then I could grab it and I could eat it, right? But butter and jelly on it and put it in a toaster and I can make you know, toast out of the moon. So they were fine with that. They say but what if you were an animal? Let's say you were a tiger. If I were a tiger, I'd go [SOUND], right? Be fierce and go through the jungle and scare everyone. That's fine. And then she asked them a final question. What if you were you? And some of the kids would just go bonkers and say this lady's crazy. Why'd she ask me what if I was me? And they'd say of course I'm me. Who else would I be? And some of them ended up in tears. She reported this to us and, and realized that in fact that was a very profound question for a young child. What if you were you? That's not an easy thing for them to consider. Young children are what Piaget termed egocentric. It's very difficult for them to imagine what other people see. There were a couple of ways that Piaget tested this. One was by asking people to do the three mountain problem. In the three mountain problem, Piaget would be looking at three mountains on one side of the table, and the opposite side of the table would be a child sitting and looking at the three mountains from a different perspective. And Piaget would ask them, okay. Tell me what your perspective is. What do you see when you see the three mountains? And then he would ask them, okay, tell me what my perspective is. How do I see the three mountains? And invariably children that were quite young had difficulty doing this task. They would always say that Piaget saw the three mountains the way they saw it. The way the child saw it. So the children were captured by their view. They were unable to see another point of view and in fact in Piaget's original studies not until about age seven could they really start to see the experimenter's view consistently. This reminds me of my youngest daughter, Camille when we used to go to the Halloween store she would grasp at each of our legs and just hug them, and not look at all of the scary monsters because they were scary, and she thought they were real. And she couldn't understand that they just looked scary, but they weren't actually scary. Of course, a couple of years later, she finally understood, oh they're just pretend, that's not scary, right. She understood that they weren't exactly what they appeared to be. It takes time to develop concrete operations. To notice and realize that the world is not exactly as it seems, that it may be different. It may appear one way and be another. One way to do this is through tasks that test what's called theory of mind. So a child is asked to look at some box, something that's hidden, that looks like one thing. So for example it could be some pencils in the Smarties box. And the child is asked okay, open the box. And when they look at it and they open it they realize that they're pencils inside, not Smarties, all right? So there are no candies inside this box. It's a pencil box. Then they, the experimenter closes the box again, and asks the child, okay, if your friend Jane were to come down here, and look at the box, what would they think is in the box. Now, young children til about three or four years of age will answer pencils because the child knows that there are pencils in the box, they assume that everybody knows that there are pencils in the box. And so, when they are asked, okay, your friend Jane came and looked at this box that said Smarties on it, candy. They say, the child says, oh well Jane will say that there are pencils inside. Why? Because I know that there are pencils inside. Over time, they'll start to realize that when Jane comes, Jane will say Smarties. Jane will think there are candies in the box because doesn't know that they are pencils. I know that they are pencils but Jane doesn't know. This type of thinking is quite sophisticated. It's called theory of mind and it's the idea that other people don't know what we know, and we know things that the other people don't know. What Piaget argued was that, as development proceeded, people became more and more able to divorce themselves from reality. They could engage in abstract thought. They could say, what if everybody got along. What if my best friend was actually going with me to college and not staying here. They think about all these idealized types of situations and part of that has to do with the development of these very abstract types of thought, what he termed formal operations. And those are included in math they are more sophisticated types of scientific thinking and you see then an explosion a very abstract type of thinking that occurs in early and late adolescents. And most adolescents would not be thrown off by this base question. Her question, what if you were you. You can hear adolescents say all the time I just didn't feel like myself today. And certainly adult say that, I'm just not myself today. So they have this sense that they are themselves. But they're not themselves, and so that question if what if you were you? What if you were not you? Becomes actually reasonable for an adult and they engage in answering that question on a daily basis.
