Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/MIT/Topics in Infant and Early Childhood Cognition (Fall)

This is a communication intensive course on cognitive development. We treat developmental psychology as “applied philosophy”—a way to answer fundamental questions about the origins and nature of knowledge. Students should expect to gain an understanding of the questions that motivate developmental research and the methods that can answer these questions. We will focus on how children acquire commonsense knowledge about the world, focusing particularly on their understanding of objects (shoes, ships and sealing wax), agents (you, me, and sometimes fuzzy green blobs) and causality (the relations that bind these together). We will examine the evidence for innate representations and also look at the processes that underlie learning and conceptual change. The course is structured around primary sources, not a textbook. Most days, students will read one brief review article and one or two empirical articles. The lectures cover 1) Cognitive Science and Commonsense Reasoning 2) Piaget 3) Central debates post-Piaget 4) Methods 5) Object knowledge 5) Number knowledge 6) Statistical learning 7) Concepts 8) Causal reasoning 9) Agents and goals 10) Theory of mind 11) Word learning 12) Moral reasoning. There are 70 students in the course however they each select among five capstone projects. Most students select to design or replicate experiments or write original research papers. The six students here have chosen to edit the Wikipedia article on cognitive development.