Active Learning
Active learning is the process by which learners actively seek, select, and organize information, shaping their own learning experiences rather than passively receiving information. It encompasses a wide range of behaviors, from making choices about what and how to learn to deciding which sources to
Autism
The concept of autism has undergone a huge transformation since the 1940s when it was first given a name. Originally, it referred to a rare neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by severe impairment in social communication and restricted repetitive behaviors. Over time, autism was recognized as
Categorization
Categorization involves treating different things as the same. One common function of categorization is recognition. When an animal recognizes a new substance as being edible, it is categorizing it as a member of the category of edible things. Another function is inference. Categorizing an object as
Causal Learning
Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Over the past 20 years, cognitive scientists have applied advances in our understanding of causation in philosophy and computer science, particularly within the Causal Bayes Net formalism, to understand hu
Cognitive Development
Cognitive development is the process of how children think and learn, from infancy through adolescence. This topic encompasses a broad range of topics, including (though not limited to) perception, attention, memory, executive functioning, language, concepts and categorization, knowledge systems, pr
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Developmental cognitive neuroscientists study the baby, child, and adolescent brain to learn when and how cognition develops. Neuroscience techniques—electroencephalography (EEG), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (
Developmental Language Disorder
Developmental language disorder is diagnosed in the approximately 8% children who would be expected to acquire their first language(s) readily—given their seemingly age-appropriate rate of development in other cognitive domains and their receipt of sufficiently rich language input—but who neverthele
Imitation
Imitation is when an observer copies a model’s body movement, and as such, it is a type of social interaction. Imitation is crucial for learning culture-specific gestures, such as facial expressions and dance movements, and it may also help us learn technical skills. In the 20th century, imitation w
Infant Consciousness
The study of infant consciousness investigates when subjective experience begins, how it unfolds, and how it maps onto neural and psychological development in the early years of life. In the first year, infants’ sensory, motor, cognitive, and social abilities expand as the brain matures. It is widel
Infant Perception
Perception is the set of processes by which organisms interpret and organize sensory information to understand the world and plan appropriate actions across different scenarios. This involves receiving input through the sensory systems (including vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell) and making
Infant-Directed Speech
When communicating with infants, we use infant-directed speech, a specialized way of speaking characterized by a higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, short utterances, and frequent repetition. The language tends to be grammatically simpler, and the vocabulary is often tailored to topics relevant to
Intuitive Theories
Intuitive theories refer to informal, and usually incomplete, understandings of distinct domains. They arise in the absence of explicit instruction and reflect people’s naturally emerging accounts of why things occur or how things work. They have multiple elements, often described as concepts. These
Metacognition
The term metacognition refers to a broad set of skills that enable people to plan their cognitive efforts, identify their errors, revise their strategies, and accept or reject their conclusions. In other words, metacognition predicts the feasibility and regulates the performance of cognitive actions
Moral Development
Moral views about what is right, wrong, good, and bad change across the lifespan and across history. Infants who hit, bite, or kick their caregivers typically grow into children who condemn most forms of violence. Societies that once accepted slavery and torture now prohibit both, and their values k
Normativity
Our lives are permeated by thinking about right or wrong, good or bad, and the like. Normativity is a pervasive and intricate part of human social being. In a broad sense, we deal with normativity whenever we apply standards of judgment or evaluation to some states of affairs. For instance, biologic
Numerical Cognition
Number is everywhere in human cognition, behavior, and culture. In a glance, a human observer can tell whether a stadium contains more fans for the home team or the visitors. When we want to be precise, we can count or use written numerals to express exact number. Number even gets expressed grammati
Parenting
The conception of parenting covers care and stimulation of infants and toddlers. Although basically all dimensions of care are included, like physical safety, nutrition, hygiene, warmth, and stimulation, the focus in mainstream developmental sciences has become mainly directed to the quality of resp
Play
Play can loosely be defined as the willing pursuit of seemingly unnecessary costs in pursuit of idiosyncratic ends. It is an intrinsically motivated, intentional behavior characteristic of, although not limited to, the young of many species. Any answer to the question, “Why do humans and other anima
Shared Intentionality
Humans do many things together collaboratively as joint agents or in groups as collective agents. It turns out that these ways of operating together as a “we” have a number of special properties as compared with the cooperative interactions of other animal species. Most important are humans’ special
Social Learning
Social learning broadly refers to learning that occurs through the learner’s social experiences, such as observing or interacting with others. In contrast, asocial or individual learning refers to learning that takes place in the absence of social input, such as through the exploration of one’s phys
Statistical Learning
Statistical learning refers to the ability to track patterns in the environment. These patterns occur in a wide array of domains (e.g., speech, scenes, melodies). Humans track statistics over stimuli ranging from simple units (e.g., phonemes, tones, geometric shapes) to abstract categories (e.g., pa