Abstract for Ann Phillips
Infant Cognition research attempts as far as possible to uncover the starting
points and building blocks of adult cognition. What are some basic concepts
that infants have in place early on to enable them to acquire eventual
adult understanding? Previous work has focused on infant understanding
of naive physics, and has demonstrated that some concepts are in place
as early as 3-months. Another realm of understanding that has been
proposed as primitive is naive psychology. I will present research that
investigates infant understanding of emotion, perception and object-directed
behavior. Like research on infant understanding of naive physics,
this research utilizes looking time methods in order to uncover when infants
understand the links between observable behaviors and other actions.