New Approaches to Infant Learning and Cognition

描述（由申请人提供）：本次会议的总体目标是将来自不同领域的婴儿学习和婴儿认知研究的研究人员聚集在一起，以便对学习在婴儿认知发展中的作用有更全面的了解。最近关于婴儿认知的工作大多集中在婴儿在发育的不同阶段似乎知道什么，但很少花时间调查这些知识是如何发展的问题。最近在多个领域对婴儿学习的研究为解决这一差距提供了有利条件，从而解决了许多关于婴儿心灵本质的未解决问题，包括学习的潜在机制和概念结构的创造。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overarching goal of this meeting is to bring together researchers from diverse areas in the study of infant learning and infant cognition in order to move toward a more general understanding of the role of learning in infant cognitive development. Much of recent work on infant cognition has focused on what infants seem to know at different points in development, but has spent less time investigating questions of how this knowledge develops. Recent work on infant learning across a number of domains offers a vantage point from which to address this gap, and thereby address a number of unresolved issues concerning the nature of the infant mind, including the underlying mechanisms of learning and the creation of conceptual structures. Leading researchers in the following areas of study will be invited to participate in this conference: Learning about Objects and Actions, Language Learning, Category Learning, Social Learning, and Processes Supporting Learning. A group of about ten high-profile younger researchers will be invited to give talks featuring how learning and cognition come together in their own work. These talks will be discussed and synthesized by a group of five senior discussants. The objectives are to provide all of the participants with examples of connections between learning cognition that they can then apply to their own research. A new synthesis of infant cognition that focuses on learning will push the field past the outdated notions of "nativism or nothing" that currently pervade researchers' thinking about the origins of cognition.