2-160 - The More You Know: How Prior Knowledge Scaffolds Cognitive Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Childhood is a period of rapid growth in knowledge. A prominent view is that this increase in knowledge itself scaffolds the acquisition of new knowledge, but the mechanisms behind this claim are not well understood. This symposium explores how prior knowledge contributes to cognitive development across the diverse domains of object recognition, visual working memory, relational knowledge, and episodic memory. Paper 1 investigates how activating different types of knowledge influences object recognition in 3-year-old children, and finds that object labels activate feature-based representations whereas object pictures activate configuration-based representations. Paper 2 demonstrates that object knowledge influences visual working memory capacity in children aged 4-9, which suggests that increasing semantic knowledge contributes to improvements in working memory over development. Paper 3 explores how environmental statistics and taxonomic relations contribute to the acquisition of new relational knowledge and the organization of semantic networks, as well as how these processes interact throughout development. Paper 4 uses pupillometry to probe how activating prior knowledge by making a prediction influences subsequent learning in 9- to 11-year-old children, and shows that individual differences in executive functions influence the efficiency with which children learn from incorrect predictions. Taken together, these presentations provide insight into the mechanisms by which prior knowledge scaffolds development across multiple domains of cognition. In addition, this symposium aims to promote a discussion about how the benefits of activating prior knowledge can be harnessed to improve learning outcomes.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Ariel Starr, UC Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Processing the Parts and the Whole: Linguistic Influences in Young Children's Visual Object Recognition - Presenting Author: Catarina Vales, Carnegie Mellon University; Non-Presenting Author: Linda B Smith, Indiana University

• Children's Semantic Knowledge Influences Visual Working Memory Capacity - Presenting Author: Ariel Starr, UC Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Mahesh Srinivasan, UC Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Silvia A Bunge, UC Berkeley

• The Role of Co-Occurrence Statistics in Lexical-Semantic Development - Presenting Author: Layla Unger, The Ohio State University; Non-Presenting Author: Olivera Savic, The Ohio State University; Non-Presenting Author: Vladimir M. Sloutsky, The Ohio State University

• Asking Children to Make Predictions: An Effective Strategy to Activate Prior Knowledge and Improve Learning? - Presenting Author: Garvin Brod, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF)