New Approaches to Infant Learning and Cognition

描述(申请人提供)：本次会议的主要目标是汇聚来自不同领域的研究人员，研究婴儿学习和婴儿认知，以便更全面地了解学习在婴儿认知发展中的作用。最近关于婴儿认知的大部分工作都集中在婴儿在发育的不同阶段似乎知道了什么，但花在调查这些知识是如何发展的问题上的时间较少。最近关于婴儿学习的多个领域的研究为解决这一差距提供了一个有利的切入点，从而解决了一些关于婴儿思维性质的悬而未决的问题，包括学习的基本机制和概念结构的创建。 以下研究领域的顶尖研究人员将被邀请参加本次会议：学习对象和行动、语言学习、类别学习、社会学习和支持学习的过程。大约十名备受瞩目的年轻研究人员将被邀请发表演讲，介绍学习和认知在他们自己的工作中是如何结合在一起的。这些演讲将由五位资深讨论者进行讨论和综合。其目的是为所有参与者提供学习认知之间联系的例子，然后他们可以将其应用于自己的研究。一种关注学习的婴儿认知的新综合将推动该领域摆脱目前弥漫在研究人员对认知起源的思考中的过时的“本土主义或一无所有”的观念。

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 A new synthesis of infant cognition that focuses on learning will push the field past the outdated notions of "nativism or nothing" that currently pervade researchers' thinking about the origins of cognition.