Representations Yielding Task-Dependent Flexibility

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的主要目标是促进对认知灵活性发展的理解。孩子们在灵活地调整自己的行为以适应不断变化的环境方面会表现出惊人的失败。例如，孩子们经常固执，重复以前的行为，当他们不再是适当的，即使在面对重复和明确的信息，以改变路线。相比之下，成熟的人类表现出独特的能力，可以灵活地调整他们的行为以适应不断变化的环境，即使在没有明确信息的情况下也是如此。发展文学中的大部分工作都集中在这个过程的一个方面-儿童积极维持为他们提供的目标的能力不断提高。虽然这项工作使人们对支持儿童灵活行为的机制有了丰富的理解，但它在很大程度上未能解决发展中的两个关键转变。首先，在儿童的目标表征的主动维护的逐步改善之前，他们表现出一种质的不同的，反应性的，形式的认知控制，检索目标，只有当他们需要的时刻。第二，即使孩子们擅长维持为他们提供的目标，以指导外源（外部线索）的灵活性，他们表现出持续的限制和发展的内源（内部驱动）的灵活性，当他们必须选择自己的目标。 拟议的研究建立在一个统一的，基于生物学的计算建模框架，通过与儿童和神经网络模型的平行研究，调查这些不同组成部分的灵活性的发展。这个框架的重点是积极的，抽象的知识表示的作用，驱动过渡从被动到主动控制，从外源到内源性控制。这项工作将推进明确的机制模型，儿童如何发展，维护和更新表征，为灵活的行为服务，并将告知应用程序，以提高灵活性-从婴儿搜索到儿童的规则使用，以提高自己驱动灵活行为的能力。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The primary goal of this research is to advance understanding of the development of cognitive flexibility. Children can show stunning failures to flexibly adapt their behavior to changing circumstances. For example, children often perseverate, repeating prior behaviors when they are no longer appropriate, even in the face of repeated and explicit information to change course. In contrast, mature humans show unique abilities to flexibly adapt their behavior to changing circumstances, even in the absence of explicit information about how or when to do so. Much of the work in the developmental literature has focused on one aspect of this process - children's increasing abilities to actively maintain goals that are provided for them. While this work has led to a rich understanding of the mechanisms supporting children's flexible behaviors, it has largely failed to address two critical transitions in development. First, prior to children's gradual improvements in proactive maintenance of goal representations, they show a qualitatively different, reactive, form of cognitive control, retrieving goals only as they are needed in the moment. Second, even after children excel at maintaining goals that are provided for them to guide exogenous (externally-cued) flexibility, they show continued limitations and developments in endogenous (internally-driven) flexibility, when they must select goals for themselves. The proposed research builds on a unified, biologically-based computational modeling framework to investigate developments in these diverse components of flexibility, through parallel studies with children and neural network models. This framework focuses on the role of active, abstract knowledge representations in driving transitions from reactive to proactive control, and from exogenous to endogenous control. This work will advance explicit mechanistic models of how children develop, maintain, and update representations in the service of flex- ible behavior, and will inform applications for improving flexibility - from infant search to children's rule use to increasing abilities to drive flexible behavior on one's own.