Psychology Colloquia Series: Dr Eszter Kortvelyesi
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Time: 12.00pm - 1.00pm
Price:
free
All are welcome to the Psychology Colloquia, where distinguished guest speakers present talks encompassing a diverse array of topics within the field of Psychology and beyond.
This week's speaker is Dr Eszter Kortvelyesi. Ezster is a PhD student at Central European University, located in Vienna, Austria. Over the past nine years, she has worked on questions related to developmental social cognition under the supervision of Erno Teglas and Gyorgy Gergely. Eszter is particularly interested in how children and infants integrate their knowledge about the physical world to enhance their understanding of intentional agents.
Abstract: Order and its interpretations by the developing mind
In this talk, I will take you through my research investigating the developing concept of order and the way this concept is integrated into the inferential apparatus infants use to evaluate the events they observe and the resulting changes in entropy. Already non-verbal infants share the intuition that not all event sequences are compatible with order. Nine to ten month old infants expect that mechanistic objects or rolling balls can not create order from randomly scattered object arrays only agents can (Newman et al., 2010; Ma & Xu, 2013; Keil & Newman, 2015). The early presence of such expectations suggests a rich understanding of agents' causal competences. We seek answer to two questions:
What further competences do infants attribute to those agents that can create order? Order must be the result of an intentional action, the sequences of which follow a well-established plan. However, all human artefact designs fall under this description. Young children have no difficulty to consider the designer's intention while establishing the function of a tool, but whether they assume that the ability to create a multicomponent tool and the ability to create order are related abilities was still an open question. Our findings suggests that infants at 14 months of age have a general concept of order and consider that the elaboration of multicomponent tools and the preparation of object arrangements that display gestalt principles fall under the same conceptual description.
Ordered arrangements may reflect not only instrumental, but also communicative intentions. Arrangements that are salient, memorable, and discriminable may be good candidates to be symbols. Therefore, we hypothesised that kindergarten-age children consider ordered patterns to be well-formed signs but not the random patterns. To test this question, we asked whether children expect the signs to fulfill their referential function unambiguously, mapping one referent to each sign. Our experiments testing 6-year-old children show that children systematically map a single referent to both types of patterns, however, their consistency is significantly higher when the patterns are ordered.
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