2-043 - Knowledge From Nowhere: How Thinking Leads to Learning in Childhood

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

How do children acquire coherent, abstract, and highly structured representations of the world so quickly and accurately? One classic answer points to the similarities between children’s learning and scientific learning. In particular, researchers have proposed that children, like scientists, implicitly formulate hypotheses about the world and then use evidence to test and rationally revise those hypotheses. In testing these claims, the majority of research in this area has investigated children’s developing abilities to draw inferences from observed data. However, we know much less about the human ability to build abstract knowledge in the absence of new evidence. Arguably, the distinguishing feature of human cognition is our ability to arrive at new ideas by thinking alone. How is learning by thinking possible? What is the role of internal processes in causal learning and reasoning? What does this phenomenon tell us about the nature of mental representations and how they change? The proposed symposium examines a suite of activities that involve “learning by thinking,” and considers how these activities impose unique, top-down constraints on the processes underlying abstract reasoning and causal inference in childhood. The first three papers highlight empirical research on the phenomena of learning by thinking in preschool-aged children, including: learning by explaining, learning by analogy, and the nature of hypothesis generation and search. The final paper provides a computational approach to understanding the mechanisms by which thought-based learning might influence the development of knowledge representations.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Caren M. Walker, University of California, Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Achieving abstraction through explanation - Presenting Author: Caren M. Walker, University of California, Berkeley; Tania Lombrozo, University of California, Berkeley; Alison Gopnik, Univ of California-Berkeley

• Learning about mental states through analogical comparison - Presenting Author: Christian Hoyos, Northwestern University; Dedre Gentner, Northwestern Univ

• Variability in Preschoolers’ Cognitive Search - Presenting Author: Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz, Rutgers University - Campus at Newark

• Children’s Learning as Theory-guided Stochastic Search - Presenting Author: Tomer Ullman, MIT; Joshua Tenenbaum, Brain and Cognitive Sciences