Thursday, June 1, A.M.

8:30-5:00   Foyer

Registration (all day)
Patapsco Book Display (all day)

9:00-9:15   Ches II   PL01   Opening Remarks – JPS President & Program Organizers

9:15-10:30   Ches II   PL01   Plenary Session 1 – David Lewis-Williams

The mind in the cave: Consciousness and the origins of art

David Lewis-Williams (University of Witwatersrand)

The transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic in Western Europe was the time when human beings committed themselves, seemingly irrevocably, to making pictures and, at the same time, to developing complex social structures. Deep underground, by the light of flickering lamps, they limned bison, horses, aurochs and other animals. This presentation considers diverse evidence for why they made this commitment and for why they first began to think that small lines on a flat surface can stand for a huge, live, moving animal. The evidence derives from the cave art itself, hunter-gatherer communities around the world, and from recent neuropsychological studies of altered states of consciousness. The naturally labyrinthine caves were transformed into manifestations of a complex supernatural realm and also into social templates that reflected the first distinctions between people that went beyond brute strength, age and sex.

10:45-12:00   Ches II   SY01   Symposium Session 1

Creativity, giftedness, and novelty: Frills or fundamentals?

Organizer: Lynn S Liben (Pennsylvania State University)
Discussant: Norman Freeman (University of Bristol)

Developmental psychologists and educators alike often place creativity, giftedness, and novelty on the periphery of their work. In the world of education, for example, when budgets are lean, it is common to see cuts made in art education, and to limit the funding of special education for gifted children. In the world of developmental psychology, theory and research commonly focus on what is normative, rather than on what is exceptional. Indeed, Piagetian theory is a particularly good example of an approach that is centered on universals of development.

This symposium reverses this tradition by asking how creativity, giftedness, and novelty inform both developmental theory and educational practice. In “Gifted Spatial Thinking in Science and Art,” Lynn Liben will describe a program of work linking developmental progressions in spatial concepts to children’s success on both scientific and artistic tasks, discuss spatially gifted thinking, and suggest how this work may inform educational programs. In “Art Not Just for Art’s Sake: Does Arts Learning Transfer?” Ellen Winner will describe an ethnographic study of intense visual arts classrooms, report observed cognitive skills and working styles that are potentially generalizable, and raise issues involved in facilitating and studying the transfer of skills across domains. In “Universals Are Not Enough: The Role of Novelty and Transformational Thinking in Ontogenetic Development and in Developmental Theory,” David Henry Feldman will address basic theoretical questions concerning the role of novelty and transformational thinking in individuals and in society, with a particular focus on how novelty contributes to advancement of knowledge in the circle of the sciences.

The discussant, Norman Freeman, will draw from his prior work on artistic development and developmental theory to comment on integrative themes and future directions.

Gifted spatial thinking in science and art

Lynn S Liben (Penn State)

Art not just for art’s sake: Does arts learning transfer?

Ellen Winner (Boston College)
Lois Hetland (Massachusetts College of Art)
Shirley Veenema (Harvard Graduate School of Education)
Kim Sheridan (Harvard Graduate School of Education)
Patricia Palmer (Harvard Graduate School of Education)

Universals are not enough: The role of novelty and transformational thinking in ontogenetic development and in developmental theory

David Henry Feldman (Tufts University)

10:45-12:00   Ches III   PS01   Paper Session 1

Issues in cognitive development

Chair: Peter Kahn (University of Washington)

Faraday and Piaget: Experimenting in Relation with the World

Elizabeth Cavicchi (MIT)

The natural philosopher Michael Faraday and the psychologist Jean Piaget experimented directly with natural phenomena and children. While Faraday originated evidence for spatial fields mediating force interactions, Piaget studied children’s cognitive development. This paper treats their experimental processes in parallel, taking as examples Faraday’s 1831 investigations of water patterns produced under vibration and Piaget’s interactions with his infants as they sought something he hid. I redid parts of Faraday’s vibrating fluid activities and Piaget’s hiding games. Like theirs, my experiences showed that incomplete observations and confusions accompanied—and facilitated—experimental developments. While working with things in their hands, these experimenters’ minds were also engaged, inferring new, more coherent understandings of the behaviors under study. Transitory ripples disclosed distinct patterns; infants devised more productive search methods. From the ripples, Faraday discerned an oscillatory condition that informed his subsequent speculations about light. From the infant search, Piaget identified experimenting as a child’s means of developing self and world, later envisioning its infusion into education. Taken together, these two stories demonstrate that cognitive capacities emerge in the actual process of experimenting. This finding eclipses the historical context in its implications for education today. When learners pursue their own experiments, their minds develop.

Innovation and Intuition in Science: Preliminary suggestions from research on the interaction between personal and disciplinary epistemologies

Jen Arner (Clark University)

Mainstream discourses about science both within and without the discipline suggest intuition plays little or no role in the formulation of scientific theories or the daily practices of scientists. When intuition is recognized – prototypically in the case of revolutionary theories or discoveries – its role is often limited to a “Eureka!”-moment which provides a novel synthesis or solution to an old problem. In contrast to that traditional conceptualization, this paper provides examples from an empirical research project in which college science students suggested three distinct uses of intuition in their scientific practices. First, students did hold out the possibility of intuition providing a novel solution, but with respect to daily practices, not just great achievements. Second, students suggested intuition serves as a heuristic pointer, providing a direction in which to proceed, but leaving the scientist to “do the work” of getting to the solution. Thirdly, students discussed intuition as evidence in its own right in the lab. This paper explores the uses that several students make of intuition in science, and explores how these may result from an interaction between the student’s personal epistemology and the scientific disciplinary epistemology that they are learning in the lab and classroom.

When familiarity breeds bad thinking: Belief-bias with reasonable and unreasonable premises

Cécile Saelen (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Hugues Lortie Forgues (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Jocelyn Bélanger (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Walter Schroyens (Université de Montréal)
Henry Markovits (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Many studies have shown that inferential behavior is strongly affected by access to real-life information about premises. However, it is also true that both children and adults can often make logically appropriate inferences that lead to empirically unbelievable conclusions. One way of reconciling these is to suppose that logical instructions allow inhibition of information about premises that would otherwise be retrieved during reasoning. On the basis of this idea, we hypothesized that it should be easier to endorse an empirically false conclusion on the basis of clearly false premises than on the basis of relatively believable premises. An initial study presented adult reasoners with inferences using either prototypically reasonable premises or completely false premises. In both cases, the logical conclusion was empirically false. Consistent with predictions, ratings of the likelihood of the conclusion were higher for completely false premises. These results illustrate the complex relationship between real-world knowledge and logical reasoning.

How can teachers enable students to pose and solve problems using context within and outside mathematics?

Judit Kerekes (City University of New York)
Maryann Diglio (City University of New York)

Case study shows Piaget finding that if young children learn using manipulatives, play, and integrated curriculum student recognize relationships more easily. (Caweleti, Gordon, 2003) The pedagogy that made Maryann’s classroom fun for the kids and engaged them in their learning was one that placed the student at the center of the teaching/learning experience, and understood that teachers could contribute best when they act as facilitators and mentors rather than authoritative figures disseminating authoritative content to be memorized and reproduced. The resultant discovery, aha moment, learning moment, made mathematics meaningful to the students. They constructed their new knowledge by doing. They were able to use strategies and models developed through the process as tools for solving new, emerging problems. They were covering Pólya’s (1969) steps of problem solving: understanding problems, devising a plan, carrying out the plan, and looking back or reflecting on problems, and they did so effortlessly and effectively. Maryann succeeded with play where so many before her failed with hard work.

Imagining the im/possible in autism

Ljiljana Vuletic (University of Toronto)
Michel Ferrari (University of Toronto)

Autistic individuals are said to have an impaired imagination. In this paper, we review biographical and autobiographical literature, poetry, fiction, and visual art by autistic individuals and show evidence of the opposite. We demonstrate that the world of autistic children and adults (at least of those who are high functioning) is filled with imaginary beings, objects, places, times, and situations. Therefore, we argue that imagination in autistic individuals is not necessarily impaired. We also argue that this mistaken characterization of autistic individuals has important implications for interventions. We emphasize the importance of studying autistic individuals and their abilities in natural settings and contexts. We suggest that broader indicators of imagination need to be considered when considering imaginative capabilities of autistic individuals. Finally, we argue for the therapeutic use of imaginative abilities of autistic individuals.

10:45-12:00   Loch I   SY02 Symposium Session 2

Varieties of relational narrative: Differing identities in differing relational practices

Organizer: Luke Moissinac (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)
Discussant: Colette Daiute (The Graduate Center CUNY)

It is increasingly being acknowledged that the foundational ontology of human existence is not one of individual abstraction but one of relation (Fishbane, 2001; Gergen, 1996; Slife, 2004), which takes the person as inextricably embedded in relationships with others. Indeed, Piaget advocated a similar perspective when he claimed that “...there are neither individuals as such nor society as such. There are just interindividual relations” (Piaget, 1977, p.210). Such a view accords well with empirical research on early infant intersubjectivity (see Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001 for a review) that locates the impetus for development in the interactive relationships between infants and their principal caregivers. From such relational beginnings, development is continuously situated in relational contexts. Such relational contextuality is even more important for identity development since the ‘other’ has been taken as intrinsic to the formation of a self-concept since Mead’s (1934) seminal formulation.

This symposium uses relational narratives to explore developing identities in differing types of relationships. In doing so, it weds a relational ontology of being with a discursive-narrative epistemology of discovery. Discourse in general, and narrative in particular, is taken to be the medium par excellence for constructing identities in interaction within communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). The narratives of interest here are not those that present a life-story in full, nor ones that explicate an entire indelible life event. Instead, they are “small” stories that pervade all social intercourse, be that everyday conversation, discussions of varying formality, or interviews. The utility of analyzing such small stories as indexes of identity projects has already been demonstrated previously (e.g., Moissinac & Bamberg, 2005) but the new undertaking here is to explicitly examine how they contribute to the management of identities in a range of developing relationships.

Four communities of practice will be represented in this symposium. First, Bamberg will depict how pre-adolescent boys construct stories of their relations with girls in informal discussions. Next, Korobov and Thorne will present aspects of how emerging adults employ nonchalance as a resource in relating relationship problems. Thirdly, Moissinac’s paper interrogates the relationship stories of queer men to display the intersection of queer sexual identity with facets of dominant masculinity. Finally, Medved and Brockmeier demonstrate how identity issues are co-constructed in doctor-patient conversations.

In these papers, we aim to both uncover the intrinsically relational nature of developing identities as well as to evince the efficacy of a discursive-narrative approach in identity development research.

The discursive management of ‘hetero-attraction’ with pre-adolescent male peers

Michael Bamberg (Clark University)

Nonchalance as a narrative resource in emerging adults’ stories about romantic relationship problems

Neill Korobov (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Avril Thorne (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Paradoxes of male queer identity development: Juxtapositions with dominant masculinity

Luke Moissinac (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)
Andrew Smiler (State University of New York, Oswego)

Assessing or interpreting the brain: Conversation between health professionals and neurologically-impaired patients

Maria I Medved (University of Manitoba)
Jens Brockmeier (University of Manitoba)

10:45-12:00   Loch II   PS02   Paper Session 2

Music development and arts education

Chair: Yeh Hsueh (University of Memphis)
Discussant: Carolyn Hildebrandt (University of Northern Iowa)

Ontogenetic roots of music and language: Play and imitation – a structure-genetic and constructivistic view on vocal development

Stefanie Stadler Elmer (University of Zurich)

Musical behaviour such as vocalising, singing, listening and moving are already present in early life. At the beginning they are universal and sensorimotor. How do infants and children grow into their oral culture, singing and speaking? Among previous developmental theories we find the idea that musical behaviour follows an invariable and age-related sequence of mastering more and more intervals or `contour schemes’ of the occidental music system. Often, we find a hidden ethnocentricity, since, tacitly, occidental musical rules are considered to be universal. Or, it is assumed that musical development is a matter of biology and innate talent. Alternatively, a new theory is presented and substantiated with empirical examples from case studies. It is called ‘structure-genetic’ because the structures of vocal activities, their genesis and their adaptation to a culture are the focus of research. It is assumed that a child’s vocal development is a highly adaptive and constructive process that starts as joyful vocal communication in infancy with caregivers. Theoretical elements, principles and hypotheses about the development are outlined. Emphasis is put on growing control and awareness of own actions and thoughts, and imitation and play. Microgenetic analyses of structural changes illustrate children’s creative and adaptive processes towards socio-cultural conventions.

Dalcroze, the body, movement, and musicality

Jay A Seitz (City University of New York)

What forms the basis of musical expressivity? The Swiss composer and music educator, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, believed that bodily processes, rhythm, and physical motion were the basis of musical expressivity and music pedagogy. We can rephrase his emphasis on the synergy between bodily and musical processes into a question: How does the body contribute to thought and musical understanding, in particular? We review a large body of research and theory on the bodily and brain basis of musical expression and find ample support for his seminal views. It thus appears that Dalcroze was onto something essential to musical thought and expression.

Differentiations and integrations. The novel knowledge in the child’s musical composition

Leda de A Maffioletti (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)

This study investigates the formation of new knowledge in Child Musical Composition, linking advancements in the field to the process of reflecting abstraction. The work is theoretically based on Jean Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology and employs the clinical method as its research methodology. The analysis of compositions follows the psychological fundaments of Michael Imberty’s musical semantics. Empirical data include 76 musical compositions by 70 subjects of 6 to 12 years of age – all students of a private school in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Data were collected during one school semester and registered as videoclips. The study includes explorations, constructions and re-constructions of musical ideas as a “real-time composition”. Results demonstrate that the development of compositions is characterized by gradual construction of a whole view. Such view is allowed by the formation of interdependence and connections that change the ways to produce knowledge, thus allowing new articulations within the composition’s macrostructure. The development of musical composition implies forms of learning that underpin symbolic exchanges in music.

The arts in support of children’s development: Changing meanings with changing theories

Kathleen A Camara (Tufts University)
W George Scarlett (Tufts University)
Anne S Perkins (Maryland Institute College of Art)
Masami Stampf (Conservatory Lab Charter School)

The notion that the arts can provide a powerful support for children’s development is not new. What is new are the meanings giving to this notion. During the hey-day of progressive education, the notion meant instilling in children a creative spirit. During the cognitive, Piagetian revolution in the late 1950’s, it meant providing arts programs in parallel to and subordinate to academics, the core curriculum, and a focus on logic and reasoning. This paper explores more positive and powerful meanings that derive from theories of multiple intelligences and from developmental systems theories. In this paper, we demonstrate the power of these newer ways of thinking about the arts and children’s development and for promoting reform in schools – both by citing the literature and by presenting case materials from research conducted in schools in U.S., Ireland and England.

Thursday, June 1, P.M.

1:30-2:45   Ches II   PL02   Plenary Session 2 – Murray Forman

Hip-hop culture, youth creativity, and the generational crossroads

Murray Forman (Northeastern University)

Hip-hop and its composite forms (encompassing rapping, DJing, graffiti, and b-boying) have evolved into a global cultural phenomenon and a multi-billion dollar industry over a thirty-year existence. Generally associated with creative youth expression, hip-hop has long been a force in joyful leisure practices but it has also subsequently emerged as a lingua franca in the expression of racial identity, spatial politics, and cultural values. Young people around the world have mobilized hip-hop aesthetics and sensibilities to amplify the crises of class and racial antagonism while articulating defiance against informal discriminatory practices and organized systems of state repression.

The creative characteristics associated with early hip-hop include genius innovation in the face of adversity and an innate capacity among primarily black and Latino urban youth to radically subvert familiar technologies, transforming them into tools of artistic production. Through hip-hop, the detritus of American popular culture has been re-inscribed and reassigned in the realm of cultural meaning. In the process, hip-hop’s most creative minds have actively embarked on a mission to revise dominant narratives about contemporary urban existence, even as they have altered the sonic and visual environment through which we all circulate.

A dilemma emerges, however, as hip-hop enters its fourth decade and the notion of hip-hop “youth” begins to unravel. Hip-hop is no longer solely the purview of a young minority contingent but is, increasingly, an important element in the lives of a diverse and aging population. The result of this change is that, not only is there a generational rift between hip-hop youth and adults associated with the Civil Rights era, but there is also now a persistent and undeniable dissonance that is evident between youth and their hip-hop-identified parents. Such developments have implications for the scholarly study of hip-hop but also for the ways in which hip-hop is situated within the traditional political party system and other conventional social settings.

In this presentation, these and other related factors will be taken up and analyzed within a series of questions, including: What are the dominant identities that are conveyed in and through hip-hop today?; What are the stakes of adopting hip-hop’s expressive forms under current conditions?; How has the influence of global corporate power and the commercial culture industries affected the creative character of contemporary hip-hop?; What, if any, are hip-hop’s political possibilities?; How does a growing generational dissonance within hip-hop culture impact its discourses and practices? What does it mean to embark on something called “hip-hop studies?”

3:00-4:30   Ches II   IS01   Invited Symposium 1

Art, self & culture

Starting from the premise that art constitutes a production of meaning, participants in this invited symposium explore fundamental questions regarding the relationship between collective culture and personal identity, convention and creativity, form and content. Brent Wilson examines the functions and aesthetic properties of adult-child and child-child collaborative visual productions. Blake Lloyd explores the functions of music videos in the cognitive and identity development of adolescents. Joe Becker uses the idea of “form”—in artistic activity and in Piaget’s constructivism—to brige our understanding of knowledge and consciousness.

Chair/Discussant: Peter Pufall (Smith College)

Children’s and adults’ collaborative images: Issues of power and pedagogy

Brent Wilson (Penn State)

A principal tenant of modernism was that each individual artist, working in isolation, was obliged to create an endless succession of innovative artworks that departed radically from previous productions. Artists, educators, psychologists, and art historians believed that children were artists whose artistic creativity must be protected from adult and societal contamination. In our postmodern time, however, notions of originality, creativity, and even “contamination” have changed. Artists willingly collaborate and unabashedly appropriate previous styles and artworks. Every text and artwork is an assumed amalgam—a hypertext, a collection, a recombination, an extension of previous works. Now some who study children’s visual culture are reassessing its character. Paradigmatic examples of modernist children’s art, we realize, were produced by adults as much as by children. Art teachers not infrequently directed—even coerced—children to produce artifacts that had the expressive look of “child art.” Now it seems reasonable to ask, “is there actually such a thing as child art?” and also to wonder “what is the ‘real’ visual culture of childhood?” When children make images free from teacher influence, they usually work from comics, cartoons, and illustrations. Acting alone or in groups, rather than being little nonconformists, kids modify existing images to produce their own knock-off versions of popular visual culture. Rather than trying to be original, kids struggle to master the conventions of contemporary visual culture. At the same time, in classrooms, students and teachers continue to co-produce images—but to whom should we attribute these classroom artifacts, to adults or children? Perhaps it is the rare setting in which adults and kids collaboratively produce visual cultural artifacts attributable primarily to young people. It is adult/student and kid/kid image-based collaborations and their pedagogical character that I wish to explore. I will present a taxonomy of visual cultural collaborative possibilities and analyze their aesthetic character and pedagogical consequences. There are: (1) collaborations in which kids organize themselves to produce things such as comic books; (2) play-like spontaneous collaborations in which kids draw on a blackboard or wall; (3) graphic dialogues and conversations in which kids together, or kids and adults, converse through images; (4) there are game-like extended dialogues or serial collaborations in which co-equals improvise as they respond to alternating sequences of individually produced images; (5) there are school art collaborations where kids alter the course of a teacher proposed project—and this is only a small sampling of types. These collaborative visual cultural productions are distinguishable from students’ mere responses to teachers’ classroom assignments. An understanding of children’s visual culture also requires attention to variables and issues such as power relationships, forms of contribution, divisions of labor, types of control, matters of ownership and attribution, instigation and redirection, originality and creativity, process and product, function and purpose, and distinctions between pedagogical, social, political, cultural, and aesthetic interests and interpretations. To know the meaning of children’s images, we must understand the conditions, ranging from collaborative to coercive, under which they were made.

Creating the self: Music video, socio-cognitive schema and positive developmental outcomes

Blake Te’Neil Lloyd (Penn State Delaware County)

Music videos can be defined as pictorial representations of life experiences, conveyed in video images on television in a musical format. They are products of the imaginations of the videos’ artists, directors, and producers. Literature on media influence generally devotes attention to the negative aspects associated with adolescent exposure to this type of media. Most researchers have concluded that adolescents 1) adopt the limited roles and often negative identities depicted or 2) use these experiences for entertainment (e.g., leisure) purposes only. In adopting either of these perspectives, I propose that two important aspects of adolescent development are minimized. First, they fail to adequately consider the newly acquired formal operational capacities associated with this developmental point in the life span – the capacity to reason, cognitively explore possibilities, and make meaning of their environments. Second, and equally important, they fail to allow consideration of the process of “trying on” of identities – a salient task of identity formation. The adolescent identity, media, and socio-cognitive schema (AIMSS) framework seeks to explain how adolescents cognitively process mass media images to create, enhance, and reinforce positive concepts of self. Data will be presented to support this theoretical position.

Understanding form: Artistic activity, Piagetian theory, and the nature of phenomenal experience

Joe Becker (University of Illinois at Chicago)

Drawing more on our conceptions of science than those of art, focused on knowledge rather than meaning, Piagetian discourse has come to emphasize objective truth disconnected from subjective experience. It is in danger, at least, of becoming complicit with the way conceptions of knowledge are split off from a concern with phenomenal experience in much of the current scientific study of cognition. Art stands as antithesis to this split. Through the similarity in the idea of form in artistic activity and in Piaget’s account of the construction of knowledge, art offers support to constructivist theory where the latter has drawn least attention and been least developed-conceptualizing the intimate connection between knowledge and consciousness. Foregrounding suggestions from Piagetian theory concerning the nature of phenomenal experience, this paper conceives consciousness in terms of form and form-content relations. This approach emphasizes the way in which pre-existing cognitive forms and newly emergent forms relate to one another providing a chain from the most abstract thought to the most basic level of phenomenal experience. This approach implies that we would do well to pursue Piaget’s understanding of the role of form in acts of knowing to the point where form is accepted into the ontology of science in such a way as to provide a basis for a non-reductionist scientific account of subjective experience.

3:00-4:30   Ches III   SY03   Symposium Session 3

Developmental and clinical perspectives on imaginary companions

Organizer: Marjorie Taylor (University of Oregon)
Discussant: Michele Root-Bernstein (Michigan State University)

The creation of an imaginary companion, either an invisible entity or a special toy that becomes a regular part of the child’s social world, is common in young children (40-60% have imaginary companions), but is not well understood. In some studies, having an imaginary companion has been associated with positive characteristics, whereas other studies report no differences or negative characteristics for children with imaginary companions (for a review see Taylor, 1999). The goal of this symposium is to present recent research investigating the social and cognitive correlates of having an imaginary companion from the perspectives of both developmental and clinical psychology. In addition to investigating the relations between having an imaginary companion (or a particular type of imaginary companion) and creativity, sociability, inhibitory control, behavior problems, and dissociation, the presenters will provide new information about the best ways to identify children who have imaginary companions and elicit information about them.

The first presentation provides an overview of the phenomenon and reports the results of research examining the relation between having an imaginary companion and creative potential. Children with imaginary companions scored higher on two measures of creativity than children without them. In presentation 2 the relation between general sociability and play with imaginary companions was investigated. Children with invisible friends, but not children with personified objects were shown to score higher on sociability than children without any type of imaginary companion. In presentation 3, children who described their imaginary companions as being relatively independent and autonomous were rated as having significantly higher social skills and significantly fewer internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors than children without imaginary companions. In presentation 4, the characteristics of imaginary companions created by a nonclinical sample of children and those created by traumatized children with dissociative symptoms were examined. In comparison with the dissociative children, the nonclinical children were more likely to report feeling in control over these experiences, pleasure in the interactions, awareness that they were pretend, and were less likely to be involved in interacting with the imaginary companions when feeling anger.

The results of these studies raise many questions about the form of imaginary companions (invisible friends vs. personified objects), the content of the fantasy (e.g., the extent that the child experiences the imaginary companion as autonomous), and the diverse functions this type of pretend play serves in the lives of children from different environments.

Imaginary companions and creative potential

Eva Hoff (Lund University)

Individual differences in children’s sociability and their play with imaginary companions

Alison B Shawber (University of Oregon)
Marjorie Taylor (University of Oregon)

Inhibitory control and social skills of children with imaginary companions

Stephanie M Carlson (University of Washington)

A comparison of imaginary companions in normal and maltreated children

Joyanna Silberg (Sheppard Pratt Health System)

3:00-4:30  Loch I   PS03   Paper Session 3

Language and communication

Chair: Michael Bamberg (Clark University)

A mental image is worth a thousand verbs: Imageability predicts verb learning

Weiyi Ma (University of Delaware)
Colleen McDonough (Neumann College)
Robert Lannon (Temple University)
Roberta Golinkoff (University of Delaware)
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek (Temple University)
Twila Tardif (University of Michigan)

Why are verbs much harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but relatively easy to learn in Chinese? The answer might lay in imageability, or the capability of a word to arouse a mental image. Research suggests that words with higher imageability are learned earlier than words with lower imageability, regardless of their grammatical class. Therefore, we hypothesize that the universal noun-advantage in early vocabulary is due to the high imageability of nouns relative to verbs. Similarly, the relative verb-advantage in early Chinese vocabulary is due to the fact that Chinese verbs tend to be highly imageable. The current study reveals two significant results. First, imageability ratings are a reliable predictor of age of acquisition across languages when we used an established vocabulary instrument (the CDI) as opposed to adult recollections about when they learned a word. Second, Chinese children’s verbs received higher imageability ratings than English children’s verbs while Chinese and English children’s nouns did not differ in imageability ratings. It appears that high imageability boosts verb learning by simplifying the process of action segmentation and relation abstraction.

Does the owl fly out of the tree or leave the tree flying?: The development and plasticity of lexicalization biases

Christina Infiesta (University of Delaware)
Rachel Pulverman (University of Michigan)

Each language has its own conflation patterns that govern the way words, especially verbs, are used. Previous research has shown that speakers of each language form lexicalization biases due to repeated exposure and use of their language. However, it appears as though adults, with sufficient exposure to a second language, can adopt the new patterns of that language regardless of the biases of the first language. This study asks when and how English learners of Spanish are able to adopt the motion expression patterns of their second language and use them in language production. In addition, a direct comparison is made with the oral productions of native Spanish children (mean age = 3;9). A comparison is also made between these two groups and native older Spanish speaking children (mean age = 12;2) in order to see how close each group comes to using the patterns of developed native language. Preliminary results show that, for learners of Spanish, increased exposure and experience with the language increases the number of path expressions produced. Additionally, by three years of age, children, like the advanced Spanish learners, already have almost complete mastery of the lexical patterns of their language.

This experiment is killing me! Children’s comprehension of verb metaphor

Jaclyn Pilette (University of Delaware)
Julia Campbell (University of Delaware)
Roberta M Golinkoff (University of Delaware)
Amanda Brandone (University of Michigan)
Rebecca Seston (University of Delaware)

Metaphor holds an important place in human language. We are constantly and unconsciously employing metaphors to assist us in expressing our intentions. Children need to understand verbal metaphors in order to participate in conversations (especially with adults) and to understand text. This study is among the first of its kind to examine how children explain novel verbal metaphors. We hypothesized that skill in verbal metaphor would increase with age and that subjects would find psychological verbal metaphors more difficult to explain than physical verbal metaphors. English-speaking 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds as well as college students were the participants. Subjects were read 24 short stories that ended in a metaphor. Eight of these were verbal metaphors. The stories were comprised of one or two sentences that preceded the metaphor in order to provide context. Preliminary results support our hypotheses. First, metaphor comprehension increased with age and second, psychological metaphors were uniformly more difficult to interpret than physical metaphors across all age groups. The finding that verbal metaphor comprehension shows a developmental trend is a significant and new result. Metaphors infuse much of our everyday language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), yet detecting and appreciating the relations implied in verbal metaphors proves a difficult task.

“Zorbs cloom”: The influence of generic language on verb-learning

Amanda C Brandone (University of Michigan)
Thomas Deptula (University of Delaware)

Research on generics (e.g., Birds fly) has focused on the role of generic noun phrases in organizing categorical knowledge and guiding inferences about members of a noun category (e.g., Birds). However, research has neglected to investigate the influence of generics on organizing predicate information accompanying generic noun phrases (e.g., fly). The current experiment examined whether generic phrases play a role in helping children realize that verbs, like nouns, can apply to more than a single instance of a category. In a book reading task, 2- and 2 1⁄2-year-olds were introduced to a novel verb using either generic or nongeneric language. Children were tested on their ability to map and extend the novel verb. Results revealed an interaction between age group and language type: Whereas 2-year-olds performed equally in the generic and nongeneric language conditions, 2 1⁄2-year-olds performed significantly better in the nongeneric condition. Findings suggest that generics may not be used as a general didactic tool; rather, generics may convey information and guide inferences specifically about noun categories. For children sensitive to the linguistic distinction between and categorical implications of generic versus nongeneric noun phrases, generics may in fact interfere with the task of verb learning.

Vacuuming with my mouth? Children’s ability to extend verbs

Rebecca Seston (University of Delaware)
Jaclyn Pilette (University of Delaware)
Julia Campbell (University of Delaware)
Nicole Tomlinson (University of Delaware)
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek (Temple University)

Children have a difficult time learning verbs and once they learn them, they are reluctant to extend them to new situations. The present study asked if 6- and 10-year-olds are able to extend common verbs to novel situations. Subjects were read eight unusual extensions of common verbs. Stimulus verbs require an instrument to perform their function. Half of the verbs use an obligatory instrument that shares the name of the action it performs (e.g., to vacuum), while the other half do not have specific instruments (e.g., to write). Two important results emerged. First, there is a developmental trend such that 6-year-olds are less likely than 10-year-olds to correctly extend the verbs. Second, children found it more difficult to extend the verbs that do not include a specific instrument than the verbs that do. These findings are significant as they reveal how difficult verb extension is, even for older children. Knowing how to extend familiar verbs - a true test of verb learning - is a more difficult and delayed task than previously imagined.

The effects of mothers’ regulatory speech on children’s participation in the task

Zilda Fidalgo (Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada)

We examined the effects of mothers’ scaffolding discourse on children’s participation in problem solving tasks, involving fifty mother-child (3-5) dyads. Mothers’ discourse was coded for the level of abbreviation and referential perspective and children’s participation as directly, indirectly and self-regulated. A negative correlation between low levels of abbreviation, referential perspective and children’s level of participation was found, but any significant correlation between higher levels of abbreviation and referential perspective and children’s self-regulation While more regulatory categories of mothers’ speech are clearly an obstacle to children’s autonomous participation, the exposition to higher cognitive demands and conceptual expressions, is open to discussion.

3:00-4:30   Loch II   PS04   Paper Session 4

Arts education—drawing

Chair: Julia Penn Shaw (SUNY Empire State College)
Discussant: Saba Ayman-Nolley (Northeastern Illinois University)

A survey of children, teachers and parents on children’s drawing experience at home and at school

Richard P Jolley (Staffordshire University)
Esther Burkitt (Open University)
Sarah E Rose (Staffordshire University)

Although much research has been carried out into the drawings children produce few studies have asked children to comment upon their experiences of drawing. Similarly, little is known about teachers’ and parents’ perspectives on children’s drawing activities and how these shape children’s drawing experience. This study aims to address this gap in the literature by surveying children, their parents and their teachers to establish how a wide range of factors (e.g., attitudes, art environment and cultural art values) are influencing children’s drawing behaviour and its development. Two hundred and seventy children aged 5 to 14 years participated in a semi-structured interview after being randomly selected within nine age groups from over 25 schools. The principle art teacher for each child was also interviewed and the child’s parents completed the parent survey; all interviews and surveys included both open and closed responses which were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. This project is still underway, but it is anticipated that the results of the study will provide a comprehensive and systematic investigation into children’s drawing behaviour at school and home. In particular, it is hoped that the results will suggest why drawing activity declines around pre-adolescence and what can be done to arrest this decline.

Of tadpoles and belly buttons: The effect of suggestion on preschoolers’ person drawings

Carol A Coté (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)

A preschooler’s ‘tadpole’ person drawing with its characteristic lack of a torso may exemplify the attention limitations of these young children. If only those few features which are most salient to the child are depicted, then a torso may simply not be important. In this study 73 preschoolers were asked to draw a person, then a person with a belly button. This task should make the torso more salient and perhaps even necessary. The tadpole drawers, however, did not change their figure type to accommodate the new feature. Instead they very economically included the belly button either inside the tadpole circle or just below the circle. The children were also asked to place a belly button on pre-drawn figures of a tadpole and a person with a torso. Interestingly, many did not respond to the pre-drawn tadpole, believed to have been drawn by another child, in the same way as their own drawing. Discussion focuses on how these findings may reflect on the meaning of the figure drawing for the child and how drawings made by another child are viewed. The findings also illustrate limits in attention and memory for features, and the consistent midline orientation of the belly button feature.

A pedagogy of the big questions of life: College students discover themselves as meaning makers through art education that transforms and liberates

Kimberly Sanborn (Northeastern Illinois University)

A constructivist understanding of human development establishes an important role for educators: to provide learning opportunities that allow students to build confidence in and raise awareness of themselves as meaning makers. This study examines college student experience of a studio art class course that involves exploration of their own lives, thoughts and feelings as they confront life’s big questions (Who am I? What does it mean to be human?) through artistic activity. Twenty–five students enrolled in an introductory ceramics course participated in this teacher research. Data from student writings, taped interviews, and the art produced in the course illustrates their achievement of liberation and transformation, representing a confluence of the deepest purposes of education and art. With this particular medium and student population, such achievement depends on: three thoughtfully designed projects; encouraging student introspection; and the classroom community that results from the public nature of studio work and sustained peer interaction. Comfort in community enables students’ openness and the courage to confront the big questions of life through their art. In this way, they develop their understanding of themselves and come to appreciate their own lives as sources of meaning.

Artistic temperaments in children? The quest for key indicators

David Pariser (Concordia University)
Paul Hastings (Concordia University)
Anna Kindler (University of British Columbia)
Axel van den Berg (McGill University)

Modern psychologists and Renaissance art historians have all speculated about the mystery of the artistic temperament. In this talk, we will consider whether there is linkage among the physiology, temperament , and the artistic ability of young children (between the ages of 2 and 9). Ninety seven children (52 boys, 45 girls) generated five drawings each: Children’s physiological responses were recorded before and during drawing activity. Children’s temperaments were established based on a standardized parental questionnaire. The children’s drawings were evaluated by 10 art-trained adult judges. A “temperamental” factor, namely being Withdrawn, seems a better predictor for girls aesthetic endeavors than for boys. Is it possible that an “artistic temperament” exists, and that it is more likely to be found among women than men? Demonstrating the existence of such a temperament among women would shed more critical light on the under-representation of women in the artistic Pantheon. Conversely, might there be gender-specific profiles that suggest the shy, reclusive girl and the calm, outgoing boy are most likely to produce work that is creative and aesthetically pleasing ? Such findings would fly in the face of the Romantic stereotype of the transgressive and turbulent (male) artist as the likely originator of significant art.

Temperament and aesthetics

Jessica E Kieras (University of Oregon)
Michael I Posner (University of Oregon)
Mary K Rothbart (University of Oregon)

Although aesthetic activities appear to be a part of all human cultures, there are individuals differences in the extent to which people are interested in art-related activities. If these individual differences are related to temperament (relatively stable, early appearing individual differences), than it may be possible to identify children who might benefit most from participation in the arts at an early age. The current study investigated temperament factors as predictors of individual differences in aesthetic interest in college students, who completed a self-report questionnaire. The Adult Temperament Questionnaire (ATQ) was used to assess four temperament factors: Positive Affect, Negative Affect, Effortful Control and Orienting Sensitivity. Aesthetic interest was assessed by adding items that assessed interest in music, visual arts, theater, and ceramics. A multiple regression using subscales of the temperament factors predicted 39% of the variance in aesthetic interest. Results will be discussed in terms of how participation in art-related activities might be especially beneficial for children with certain temperamental qualities.

4:45-5:45   Ches I   PT01   Poster Session 1

Poster Session 1: Cognitive / Social

Posters will be available for viewing all day. Authors will be present from 4:45-5:45

1. Clarifying the relation between bullying and social cognition

Laura Failows (Simon Fraser University)

2. The impact of audience type on the communication of emotional information in children’s drawings

Esther Burkitt (The Open University, UK)

3. Do the ends justify the means? Variations in sibling teachers’ responses to learner errors

Holly E Recchia (Concordia University)
Nina Howe (Concordia University)
Stephanie Alexander (Concordia University)

4. Shake your rattle down to the ground: Infants’ exploration of objects relative to surface

James D Morgante (University of Massachusetts - Amherst)
Rachel Keen (University of Massachusetts - Amherst)

5. Does it matter that nature’s “real”? A plasma window’s effects on looking behavior and heart rate recovery from low level stress

Peter Kahn (University of Washington)
Nathan G Freier (University of Washington)
Rachel L Severson (University of Washington)
Jennifer Hagman (University of Washington)
Brian Gill (Seattle Pacific University)
Batya Friedman (University of Washington)
Erika N Feldman (University of Washington)
Sybil Carrere (University of Washington)
Anna Stolyar (University of Washington)

6. The role of input in children’s acquisition of mental state verbs and a theory of mind

Alice Ann Howard (University of Connecticut)
Letitia Naigles (University of Connecticut)
Lara Mayeux (University of Oklahoma)

7. Children’s evaluations of parental roles in the home and the workforce

Stefanie Sinno (University of Maryland)
Melanie Killen (University of Maryland)

8. An investigation of sex differences in emotion based decision making

Warren D Anderson (Temple University)
Anthony Steven Dick (Temple University)
Willis F Overton (Temple University)

9. The developmental relations between theory of mind and gender-typed development in preschoolers

Michael R Miller (University of Victoria)

10. Patterns of children’s social thought and quality of attachment relationships

Manuela Veríssimo (UIPCDE, ISPA)
António J Santos (UIPCDE, ISPA)
Ligia Monteiro (UIPCDE, ISPA)

11. Developmental vulnerability to irrational gambling judgments: A dual process account

Eric Amsel (Weber State University)
Paul Klaczynski (National Science Foundation)

12. Assessing children’s drawing ability

Marc H Bornstein (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development)
Martha E Arterberry (Gettysburg College)
Darlene A Kertes (National Institutes of Health)
Joan Suwalsky (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development)
Paola Venuti (Università di Trento)

13. A comparison of preschoolers’ explanations of their own actions in two different representational contexts

Cristina M Atance (University of Ottawa)
Jennifer L Metcalf (University of Ottawa)

14. Creative representations in science learning: Examining variations of categorization in a concept sorting task

Hiroshi Maeda (Saitama Prefectural University)

15. Are photographs snapshots or works of art?

Deborah R Siegel (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Lisa E Szechter (Tulane University)

16. Hip hop and popular music as vehicles for psychological development and social change

Kim Passamonte (North Carolina Central University)
Glenn Foster (North Carolina Central University)
Cinawendela Nahimana (Gwamaziima Charter School)
Jonathan Livingston (North Carolina Central University)

17. Cultural variations in children’s drawings of the elderly

Saba Ayman-Nolley (Northeastern Illinois University)
Sonya Delgado (Northeastern Illinois University)
Lisa Krause (Northeastern Illinois University)
Jennifer Baker (Northeastern Illinois University)

18. Motivational orientations and their relations to identity status in adolescence

Theo Elfers (Simon Fraser University)
Tobias Krettenauer (Humboldt University at Berlin)

19. The aesthetic value of thinness in preadolescents from two different cultural backgrounds

Irene Solbes (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Ileana Enesco (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Carolina Callejas (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

20. Assessment of children’s personality development through narrative methods

Giselle B Esquivel (Fordham University)
Kimberly Banks (Fordham University)
Staci Bloom (Fordham University)

6:00-7:00   Ches II   ART   Artists’ Panel

Artists’ Panel: Creative processes across the arts

Moderator: Constance Milbrath

Artists: Elizabeth Arnold (University of Maryland)
Maren Hassinger (Maryland Institute College of Art)
Gerald Levinson (Swarthmore College)

Three highly regarded artists from the fields of literary, visual, and musical arts will comment on their artistic development from their first identification as an artist, on the sources of inspiration for their artistic ideas, and on the creative process that they follow in bringing an idea into fruition.

Elizabeth Arnold teaches poetry at the University of Maryland. Her first book of poems, The Reef, was nominated for the Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize in 2000. In 2002 she won a Whiting Writers Award, conferred by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation in New York. The awards are given annually to only ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. She has received a Lannan Foundation-sponsored fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, a Yaddo fellowship, a Bread Loaf scholarship, a Friends of Writers tuition grant, and, most recently, a Bunting fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems and essays have appeared in Slate, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Poetry Daily, Kalliope, Sagetrieb, and Caroline Quarterly. She edited and wrote the afterword for the first edition of Mina Loy’s novel, Insel, which was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1991. Arnold has taught at the University of Chicago and Warren Wilson College and recently joined the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland.

Maren Hassinger is Graduate Director at the Maryland Institute College of Art and has been Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art, one of the oldest programs of its type in America. A graduate of Bennington and UCLA, she has mounted many solo exhibitions and participated in more than 120 group shows. Her work is included in more than 34 catalogs and in the public collections of AT&T, the Pittsburgh Airport as well as in outdoor areas such as Grant Park, Chicago. The “Anonymous Was A Woman” and International Association of Art Critics awards recipient has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, been reviewed extensively in Art in America, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, the Baltimore Sun, and ART news among others. She has received grants from the Gottlieb Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts and been artist in residence at ASAP, the Nature Conservancy/Andy Warhol Estate, the Printmaking Workshop and Studio Museum in Harlem. The Rinehart School of Sculpture is at the center of innovation in this evolving medium, where students work in a wide range of mediums and approaches – from stone-carving and metals casting to installations and time-based art such as video and performance.

Gerald Levinson is the Jane Lang Professor of Music at Swarthmore College. He has been increasingly recognized as one of the major composers of his generation. His teachers included George Crumb, Richard Wernick, and George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania; Ralph Shapey at the University of Chicago; and French composer Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory. Levinson has received many awards for his music, including the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and the Music Award (for lifetime achievement) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two N.E.A. Fellowships, and the Prix International Arthur Honegger de Composition Musicale. He spent two years in Bali as a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar and as a Guggenheim Fellow. His works have been widely performed in the US and Europe, by such orchestras as the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Recordings are available on CRI, Laurel, Albany, and CRS labels. His newest work, Toward Light, for organ and orchestra, was recently premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra to inaugurate the new organ in its concert hall.

7:00-8:00   Gallery   REC1   President’s Reception

President’s Reception (sponsored by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers)

Friday, June 2, A.M.

9:00-10:30   Ches II   IS02   Invited Session 2

Why arts education? Research evidence about processes and outcomes

Chair/Discussant: K Ann Renninger

The RAND report, Gifts of the Muse, calls for developing an analytical framework that explains the benefits of arts education and goes beyond simply saying that arts education is distinctive (McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras, & Brooks, 2004). Research on arts education and arts programs have begun to describe their potential for supporting problem solving and learning, or learning how to learn, as well as “the habits of mind, competencies, and personal dispositions inherent to arts learning” (Deasey, 2000, p. 1-2). Current issues in this research concern identification of relevant indicators for study, the nature and scope of participation, and to what “arts” is understood to refer (exposure and/or talent development).

This interactive symposium is designed to engage its participants in thinking seriously about the impact of arts education. It will focus on findings from current research projects in order to consider answers to three questions:

a. What are the salient characteristics of arts education as an environment for learning- in and/or out of school?

b. Who participates and how do they gain access? What impact do the arts have on children’s learning?

c. What is unique about the arts as a context for learning?

The symposium will open with presentations of answers based on research findings and will then be opened for discussion of symposium questions by symposium participants and the audience. K. Ann Renninger will chair and moderate this session.

Hidden within arts: Problem-seeking and solving

Shirley Brice Heath (Brown University)

Reported here are two multi-year studies of intensive immersion of primary-level children in creating arts-based learning environments for their schools. (Note that both schools are located in England where the government has a national policy of sponsorship for partnering schools in rejuvenating areas with creative opportunities.) The twist in the two programs—one centered on visual and language arts and the other on dramatic arts--that sets them outside regular arts lessons was the public role of the projects undertaken by the children. As planners, managers, critics, and spokespersons for both their arts and the environments needed for their creative work, the children came to identify themselves as figures with power and voice within the school culture and for the school within the community. The children, living in severely economically depressed and isolated geographic regions and often marked as “learning disabled,” exhibited gains in attentional focus and cognitive, linguistic, and mathematical achievement. The process of their changes and their roles in shaping their learning environments point to some previously unrecognized elements of educational entrepreneurship channeled through the arts.

Ecologies of opportunity: The arts in comprehensive high schools

Dennie Wolf (Brown University)

This paper presents data from an in-depth study of the role that arts activities play in the lives of students attending comprehensive high schools. In particular, the data and discussion focus on the ways in which the arts are often, though not categorically, “ecologies of opportunity” providing access to learning expectations and experiences that are rare for adolescents. These include the expectation to produce, not just to consume, knowledge; to develop a critical stance on the process of education, and to transfer learning to spaces outside school. In addition, the paper raises questions about the traditional ways of thinking about the outcomes of arts education and traditional methods for capturing the effects of sustained engagement in the arts.

“Don’t be shy, sing, stand tall...stand tall means you can do it”: Self-efficacy and learning in an out of school choral training program

Sara Posey (Swarthmore College)
K Ann Renninger (Swarthmore College)

Findings are reported from a cross-sectional mixed methods study of 7-18 year-old participants’ feelings of self-efficacy and learning in a rigorous out-of-school choral training program. The directors provide opportunities for participants to develop an appreciation of music, the ability to read music, and a sense of their own possibilities (in music, as part of a community, as learners). Consistent with studies of (a) arts programs as supports for student learning, (b) powerful learning environments, and (c) prodigious talent development, the choral training program supports participants who would traditionally be considered “at-risk” to sustain and deepen interest for a variety of music, learn music-related knowledge and skills, and develop cognitively, socially and emotionally. Developmentally, participants’ feelings of self-efficacy in working with rigorous musical content appears to fluctuate due to their representational redescription of themselves as participants and musicians.

9:00-10:30 Ches III SY04 Symposium Session 4

Executive functioning & emotion regulation

Organizer: Dana Liebermann (University of Victoria)
Discussant: Ulrich Müller (University of Victoria)

Increasingly, attention is being given to the concept of emotional regulation in developmental psychology. The study of emotion regulation, however, is complicated by difficulties in differentiating an emotion from the regulation of that emotion. What makes emotion regulation such an attractive construct to study is its ability to account for how and why emotions organize or facilitate other psychological processes such as Executive Functioning (EF; Cole et al., 2004). Although emotional control can be differentiated from EF, it is believed that emotional control is influenced by and, in turn, influences the development of EF. The three presentations in this symposium are examples of research that attempts to clarify how and why EF and emotion regulation are related.
The regulation of attention and its relationship with emotion regulation is an example of current interest in investigating linkages between EF and emotion regulation. The executive attention network is seen to underlie temperamental effortful control, the ability to suppress a dominant response in favor of a subdominant response (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005). The first presentation will present evidence supporting a link between the functioning of the executive attention network and children’s regulation of the expression of emotion.

Researchers have suggested that the cognitive changes allowing preschoolers to integrate multiple perspectives are the same changes required for development of EF (Prencipe & Zelazo, 2005). The second presentation examines the role of perspective on preschoolers’ affective decision making and demonstrates how developments in deliberate problem-solving influence self-regulation.

The third and final presentation of the symposium will describe a study that investigates the relationships between EF, social cognition and emotion regulation in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. By assessing these three constructs, their developmental trajectories, their structural relationships and individual differences on each construct can be examined.

These presentations unite research examining both the cognitive and social interaction aspects of emotion regulation, providing clarification regarding the relationship between EF and the regulation of emotions.

Affective decision making for self and other

Angela Prencipe (University of Toronto)
Philip David Zelazo (University of Toronto)

Executive attention and the regulation of affect displays

Jessica E Kieras (University of Oregon)
Jennifer Simonds (University of Oregon)
M Rosario Rueda (University of Granada)
Mary K Rothbart (University of Oregon)

Executive functioning, social cognition & emotion regulation in preschoolers

Gerry Giesbrecht (University of Victoria)
Dana Liebermann (University of Victoria)

9:00-10:30   Loch I   PS05   Paper Session 5

Cross-cultural issues in social relations

Chair: Susan Golbeck (Rutgers University)
Discussant: Kristin Neff (University of Texas at Austin)

Rethinking measures of Cultural Continuity within Indigenous communities: Will what works on the coast work on the plains? (Kachimaa Mawiin “Maybe for Sure”)

Christopher E Lalonde (University of Victoria)
Michael J Chandler (University of British Columbia)
Brenda Elias (University of Manitoba)
Michael Hart (Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs)
Kathi Avery Kinew (Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs)
John O’Neil (University of Manitoba)

In Canada, the suicide rate for Indigenous persons is 3-5 times higher than that of the general population. For Indigenous youth, the rates are 5-20 times higher. Our own efforts to understand these grim statistics led us to examine the possibility that suicide rates would be lower within Indigenous (First Nations) communities that engage in specific cultural and political practices that work to preserve and promote traditional knowledge and to strengthen commitment to community. Thus far, our work in British Columbia has identified a set of nine community practices that are associated with substantial reductions in suicide risk. These include measures of direct political control over community services (e.g., policing, education, health, child protection), the preservation of cultural activities (e.g., traditional language use, construction of cultural facilities), and of success in securing self-determination (e.g., self-government, land claims and treaty negotiations). Though strongly predictive of community-level suicide rates, these indexes of “cultural continuity” were created with reference to the particular socio-historical context of the First Nations of British Columbia. Whether or not these measures can be made to apply to distinctly different Indigenous communities in other regions of Canada remains an open question. The study to be presented describes the process of adapting the model developed in British Columbia to the Dene, Cree, Ojicree, Ojibway, and Dakota peoples of Manitoba.

First Nations women: Supporting the health and cultural identity of youth

Robin A Yates (University of Victoria)
Christopher E Lalonde (University of Victoria)

For Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, the effects of colonization continue to be measured in lowered health status and increased death rates—and especially in elevated rates of youth suicide. Among First Nations youth, suicide rates appear to be influenced by community efforts to preserve and promote traditional culture and to assert control over community life. This study concentrates on one aspect of such efforts—the participation of First Nations women in local government—and on the fact that suicide rates are lower in communities where women occupy the majority of seats on the Band Council. In-depth interviews were conducted with ten First Nations women with extensive experience in community governance. The interviews were analyzed for themes regarding how and why these women became involved in their local government, how they conceptualize their roles as women, what perspectives they hold regarding the development and transmission of culture, and the ways in which they value youth. By focusing on the positive effect women leaders can have on the identity and health of youth, this research broadens our understanding of the relationship between First Nations cultural identity and youth suicide rates and provides support for the involvement of First Nations women in local government.

Metaphors of cancer: Cross-cultural differences in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children

Ulrich Teucher (University of Saskatchewan)

The use of literary tropes such as metaphors can provide reference frames for the study of children’s narratives and source models for research in developmental psychology. In cancer narratives, metaphors constitute complex cognitive models through which patients undertake to organize, represent, and (re)constitute complex body, self, illness, life, and death. But, for many developmental reasons, it is much harder for children with cancer to give voice to their experience and little is known how children from various cultural backgrounds differently adjust to such crises. The study being reported here employs an empirically generated “Therapeutic Psychopoetics” that can make the therapeutic, psychological, and aesthetic properties of those metaphors explicit that young cancer patients employ in their narratives. A Study Group of 25 Cree children and a Control Group of 25 Caucasian children were invited to provide metaphors and oral narratives of their lives with cancer. The results reveal interesting similarities and cultural differences in the use of metaphors and the composition and content of oral accounts of cancer, showing how Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children think about life with cancer, its treatment, and healing.

Affect, values and respect: The need for cross-cultural research

Yeh Hsueh (University of Memphis)
Katherine M Kitzmann (University of Memphis)

In 1932 Piaget offered a conceptual distinction between children’s unilateral and mutual respect, and he later further elaborated the properties of respect. However, little developmental research has addressed this topic since then. Piaget’s definition of respect in terms of social exchange touches on the concept of affects (i.e., children’s respect originates from fear of and affection for parents) and relies on the concept of values (i.e., respect is essentially an attribution of value to another person). But in other ways affects and values were not well integrated in Piaget’s theory of knowledge development. Pointing out this disconnection, Terry Brown revised Piaget’s social exchange model to incorporate affective development. Similarly, because norms for affects and values are both culturally mediated, we believe that research on respect from a Piagetian perspective would benefit from the incorporation of concepts from cultural psychology and cognitive anthropology. Such integration would not likely entail any significant change in current research method. Rather, this integration would serve a heuristic purpose in promoting more cross-cultural research on children’s respect, and would provide a meaningful conceptual framework for interpreting results of new research in this area.

Fairness and selfishness in negotiations about sharing: A developmental and cross-cultural perspective

Monika Keller (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Michaela Gummerum (University of British Columbia)
Jutta Mata (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Zhou Liqi (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

We will present findings from a study integrating moral development and behavioral economics in a group decision-making experiment. Children of four different age groups decided individually and negotiated in a group of three how to share a sum of money with an anonymous other group (dictator-game). Negotiations were videotaped and analyzed. Individual decisions revealed that an equal split was the modal choice. The youngest group was slightly more egoistic than the older groups. In general, groups gave slightly less than individuals. Fairness was used most frequently as reason for equal split across all age groups. Fairness arguments and attributions of positive characteristics to the other (anonymous) group supported the increase the offers, while arguments characterizing the other group as negative served to decrease the offer. Attributions to others were used more frequently by older children and adolescents compared to the youngest group. Analysis of the process of argumentation will be presented. We will also discuss findings from a cross-cultural comparison with groups of Chinese children and adolescents of the same ages. First results show a predominance of economic arguments compared to the more private arguments of the German sample.

9:00-10:30   Loch II   SY05   Symposium Session 5

Theoretical dialogue about the development of young children in a child care center

Organizer: Vera Vasconcellos (State University of Rio de Janeiro)
Discussant: Cintia Rodriguez (University of Portsmouth)

The main aim of this symposium is to develop a dialog among different theoretical perspectives concerning human development. The basis for this discussion is through common empirical data, observations in form of video recordings, of a University Child Care Center from a public University in Niteroi, Brazil. These observations were done weekly, focusing on the first two months (May and June) of the children (20 to 24 months of age) in this new educational environment. The observations focused the children’s interactions with the environment, other children, family and staff. The original study, developed by Vasconcellos, through Henry Wallon’s sociogenetic approach, analyses the role of imitation in the developing concept of self, of others and of things. Colinvaux takes another perspective when analyzing these observations, that looks into cognitive processes. Focussing on children’s actions when playing with toys and with other children, she shows how repetition of actions generates a broadening spectrum of actions as well as new ones, thereby allowing the young child to build knowledge. Dibar et al, on the other hand, explore the possibility of finding evidence in children’s actions that may contribute to the current discussion of domain specificity. In this view, they will focus the neuroconstructivist perspective of development (Karmiloff-Smith) on the origins of cognition. They will discuss, particularly, the theme of the gravitational field in which we are born and that has an evolutionary impact even on the formation of our organism. In the video recording, they take into account the children’s games on the slide, on the trail and with small toys. Together these three perspectives have the objective of discussing the mediational nature of social, historical and cultural contexts on one side and constraints on the other, in the processes of development of small children. This discussion tries to link contributions of developmental psychology and articulate it to the needs of child education. The challenge here is to elaborate a proposal that will meet the needs of these small children with effective participation from all: researchers, teachers and parents, to ensure quality in child education, that promotes healthy development for children.

Play and imitation in a peer interaction

Vera Vasconcellos (State University of Rio de Janeiro)
Aline Barbosa de Sa (Lehigh University)

Play, actions and knowledge building processes

Dominique Colinvaux (Universidade Federal Fluminense)

Contributions from a neurocognitive approach

Celia Dibar (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Maria Teresa Cafferata (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

10:45-12:00   Ches II   PL03   Plenary Session 3 – Carol Lee

Every shut eye ain’t sleep: Modeling the “scientific” from the everyday as cultural processes

Carol Lee (Northwestern University)

The arts provide a unique mediating role in human development, offering a medium and context through which both cognitive and socio-emotional development can be cultivated. In everyday contexts, music, film, dance and the visual arts play such roles; often embodying cultural scripts, models of human action, and arenas of disputation within and across cultural communities. Involvement with these art forms is situated in social spaces in which language, artifacts, and interactions with other people that provide the resources through which learning and engagement are negotiated. While we have lots of evidence that everyday settings outside of school are organized in ways that support deep engagement in such learning through the arts, schools have been successful typically only in specialized arts programming that is not considered a major stream of academic work.

And in schools serving youth from low-income and minority communities, such programming often receives only minimal support. However, how everyday knowledge in the arts can be leveraged to support specific academic forms of disciplinary learning, particularly in fields such as literary reasoning, mathematics and science, has not been sufficiently researched, especially with regard to youth from ethnic minority and low-income communities.

In this presentation, I examine how everyday knowledge in the arts offer conceptual anchors for modeling particular concepts and inscriptions in science, mathematics and literary reasoning. I will illustrate the functions that such anchors serve in real cases of instruction organized around building upon cultural repertoires of youth from ethnic minority and low-income communities. In particular, I am concerned with understanding how a particular area of the creative arts, specifically the comprehension of fictional narratives, can bridge from the everyday to the academic, where the academic is operationalized as reading canonical literature. The canonical literature is here defined as literature which speaks deeply to the human condition and has stood the test of time, crossing national borders. Specifically, I will illustrate how tacit knowledge of African-American English rhetorical forms as well as of youth and popular cultural forms were transformed to disciplinary specific modes of reasoning. This transformation represents what Geoffrey Saxe calls a form-function shift in the uses of cultural forms from one context and function to another.

I argue that such modeling from the everyday to the disciplinary can support multiple outcomes in both the cognitive as well as the psycho-social dimensions of learning: conceptual understanding, disciplinary dispositions and habits of mind, identification with the practices of the discipline, resilience and persistence in the face of difficulty and failure, and goal setting. I argue that literary reasoning can also provide an arena in which youth can learn ways of coping with life circumstances and that such learning is necessary for all youth, but particularly for those struggling with the challenges of poverty and societal stigmatization through racism.

The Cultural Modeling Framework provides conceptual and methodological tools for leveraging knowledge constructed in everyday practices in service of learning within academic disciplines. The Cultural Modeling Framework is offered as both a conceptual and methodological tool for the design of learning environments in which these dual goals of cognitive and psycho-social development are addressed in ways that privilege the repertoires that youth develop in their everyday lives in ways that build on and expand such repertoires for academic learning within disciplines. This framework examines learning as cultural processes in which knowledge, beliefs, and practices are negotiated.

Friday, June 2, P.M.

12:00-12:30   Ches II   MEM   Annual Members Meeting

Annual Members Meeting

All JPS members are encouraged to attend.

1:30-2:45   Ches II   SY11   Symposium Session 11

Possibility and its play in critical exploration

Organizers:
William Shorr (Harvard Graduate School of Education)
Kate Gill (Harvard Graduate School of Education)
Discussant: Eleanor R. Duckworth (Harvard Graduate School of Education)

This symposium investigates Piaget’s notion of possibility and its location in three different Critical Explorations. Critical Explorations are active investigations into phenomena fueled by conversations. The method was developed by Eleanor Duckworth based on her work with Inhelder and Piaget and draws heavily on Piaget’s original Clinical Method (Duckworth, 2005).

Critical Exploration contrasts with most teaching methodologies, first in the choices of materials that learners encounter and second, in the teachers’ stance of eliciting learners’ thoughts and interest rather than telling learners what and how to think. Together, these practices support teachers’ research on the evolving ideas, interests and commitments of their students, allowing them to support, in turn, the learners’ active development. Over the past three decades, research based on Critical Explorations has informed teaching and learning in richly diverse subject matter, from courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to classrooms and informal educational settings all over the world.

In these three papers, adult English Language Learners consider a painting by Cézanne in the gallery of an art museum, secondary students interpret Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and social studies educators begin designing a game for teaching peace as subject matter. Each of the papers traces one or more episodes of collaborative knowledge construction within these contexts, looking closely at how learners engage with each other and how this particular sort of pedagogical experience supports the expansion of the students’ sense of the possible.

Two of the papers describe different, yet characteristic features that arise in the unfolding discourse of Critical Explorations. The first investigation, by Gill, explores Critical Exploration through a Bakhtinian lens, analyzing how the utterances of adult English Language Learners function to produce authentic as contrasted with scripted dialogues. The second, by Mayer, focuses on the ways in which authority is represented and distributed between a teacher and her students in a literature classroom. In the final paper, Shorr explores the development of teachers’ intellectual and dispositional structures in a professional development workshop context.

As a group, these papers illustrate the contours of Critical Exploration as a research and teaching methodology. Individually, they analyze Critical Explorations at the level of the utterance, move, and narrative. Each, in its own way, tells what Duckworth has termed “a story about the collective creation of knowledge” (2001, p.1).

Here all is possible: Critical exploration with adult English language learners in an art museum

Kate Gill (Harvard Graduate School of Education)

Critical exploration and the distribution of au