3-025 - When and Why Younger Learners Do Better Than Older Ones: From Wider Possibilities to Narrower Focus

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

This symposium describes four cases, using very different methods (neuroimaging, TDCS, looking-time, behavior, computation) and age groups (infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and adults) in which younger learners (or adults whose control areas are disrupted) perform better than older or undisrupted learners. How can this counter-intuitive pattern be explained? In this symposium, we consider the hypothesis that the acquisition of knowledge and the development of executive control may actually narrow the range of possibilities that learners consider. Younger learners might therefore outperform older learners at perceiving, remembering, and learning about unlikely events, and considering unlikely possibilities.

In the first paper, Magnetoencephalography (MEG) results suggest that, between 7 and 12 months, infants use their nascent knowledge of speech production to develop an internal model of the movements necessary to produce it. This may lead younger infants to discriminate non-native speech sounds better than older infants. The second paper uses looking-times to show that younger infants demonstrate better memory for impossible physical causal events than older infants. Developing knowledge of causal relations may lead to a narrower focus on events that are consistent with that knowledge. Next, empirical data using TDCS methods indicates that adults whose frontal function is disrupted, thus simulating young children, perform better on tasks that require consideration of many possibilities. Finally, causal learning studies show that toddlers are better at inferring unusual relational causes than three-year-olds, and this is explained in computational terms.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chairs

• Caren M. Walker, University of California, Berkeley

• Alison Gopnik, Univ of California-Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Infants’ Brains Create ‘Internal Models’ of the Speech They Hear - Presenting Author: Patricia K. Kuhl, University of Washington

• Young But Not Older Infants Remember Impossible Events: Learning Biases for Intuitive Physics - Presenting Author: Su-hua Wang, Univ of California

• When a Little Frontal Cortex Goes a Long Way - Presenting Author: Sharon Thompson-Schill, Univ of Penn

• Why Younger Learners Are Better (Or at Least More Open-Minded) Than Older Ones: The Case of Relational Causal Learning - Presenting Author: Alison Gopnik, Univ of California-Berkeley; Caren M. Walker, University of California, Berkeley