Conference on Mechanisms of Cognitive Development: Behavioral and Neural Perspectives, Pittsburgh, PA, October 1998

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This grant will support a conference to bring together researchers from a variety of backgrounds to consider how children's thinking evolves during development, with a particular focus on the role of experience in causing change. This is a fundamental topic related both to the processes by which children learn and those that make children ready and able to learn from experience. Both behavioral and neural approaches to these issues will be considered. The behavioral approaches will include research on the 'microgenesis' of cognitive change---that is, research that considers development as it occurs over relatively short periods of time (e.g., several hour-long sessions) in specific task situations such as solving arithmetic problems. Research on cognitive change over longer time scales (months and years) will also be considered, as will research that uses computational modeling and dynamical systems approaches to processes by which change in thinking ability occur. Neural approaches will include the study of the way in which neuronal responses, and the connections among neurons, change in response to experience, particularly as these changes are expressed during the actual process of acquiring new thinking skills in children and adults. Other neural approaches include studies of the possible basis of the emergence of cognitive abilities through the progressive maturation of various brain structures, and studies of the effects of experience on the organization of and internal representations in various brain regions. The conference will also consider developmental anomalies such as autism and attention deficit disorder as windows on normal function. The following questions will be examined in the course of the workshop: 1) Why do cognitive abilities emerge when they do during development? 2) What are the sources of developmental and individual differences, and of developmental anomalies in learning? 3) What happens in the brain when people learn? 4) How can experiences be ordered and timed so as to optimize learning? The answers to these questions have strong implications for how we educate children and remediate deficits that impede development of thinking abilities. These implications will be drawn out in discussions among the participants. The proceedings of the symposium will be published as a volume in the Carnegie Symposium series.