PSYC 302 Lecture Notes - Prototype Theory, Joint Attention, 18 Months
Document Summary
Concepts: general ideas or understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstraction that are similar in some way, crucial for helping people make sense of the world. Categorization of objects beyond infancy: as children move beyond infancy, their ability to categorize expands greatly, two of the most important trends, increasing understanding of category hierarchies, increasing understanding of casual connections. Both involve knowledge of relations among categories. Three properties of na ve psychological concepts: they refer to invisible mental states, the concepts are all linked to each other in cause-effect relations, they develop early in life, infants" naive psychology. Infants think about other people in terms of invisible constructs by 1 year of age and possibly earlier. Explaining the development of theory of mind: there is a theory-of-mind module (tomm), a hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings. Interactions with other people are crucial for developing theory of mind.
