PITTSBURGH--The latest research in how children think and learn will be highlighted Oct. 9-11 when the 29th Carnegie Symposium on Cognition is held at Carnegie Mellon University.
Titled "Mechanisms of Development: Behavioral and Neural Perspectives," the symposium is sponsored by the university's Department of Psychology and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a joint project between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. Both the behavioral and neural aspects of cognition will be considered as Carnegie Mellon scientists and other internationally known experts in the field of child development explore how children's thinking evolves during their development and the how their experiences affect their thinking and learning processes.
"The Carnegie Symposium provides an opportunity for researchers who are working on the most contemporary issues in cognitive psychology and developmental neuroscience to come together and share their ideas," said conference organizer James L. McClelland, a professor of psychology and co-director of the CNBC. "These scientists are among the very best at what they do, and we are pleased that some are coming from across the country or from around the world to be with us."
McClelland's own work brings a computational perspective to the study of learning and development, based on "Parallel Distributed Processing," his 1986 book with David Rumelhart.
The other conference co-organizer is Robert S. Siegler, the Heinz professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon and an expert in how children develop problem-solving and reasoning skills. Siegler is the author of the 1996 book "Emerging Minds: The Process of Change in Children's Thinking" and many other books and journal articles on the subject of how thinking develops in children.
McClelland and Siegler believe that many of the issues that will be presented at the symposium have significant implications on how children should be educated as well as on how children with developmental disorders should be treated and educated.
"We often think that the process of cognitive development"short term or long term"follows a specified blueprint, much like the development of a caterpillar into a butterfly is preprogrammed by nature," said McClelland. "But research has shown us that a child's development also reflects his or her experiences and changing world view and cannot be reduced to the simple unfolding of a pre-specified plan."
Each day of the conference will focus on a particular theme and will consist of a series of lectures followed by a discussion led by a leading researcher. Speakers on the first day will address the microgenesis of cognitive change, or how learning develops over short periods of time. For example, researchers in this area might examine how a child's approach to solving simple arithmetic problems changes over the course of a few days.
Speakers on the second day will present studies of change over longer periods of time, for example, how areas of the brain are assigned to various tasks throughout a child's development or how a child's understanding of spatial relationships changes as he or she ages from three to eight years.
In addition to Siegler and McClelland, speakers on the microgenesis of cognitive change include: Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago; Michael Merzenich, University of California, San Francisco; and Richard Haier, University of California, Irvine. The discussant will be James Stigler, University of California, Los Angeles.
Speakers on the process of change over longer time scales include: Esther Thelen, Indiana University; Robbie Case, University of Toronto; Deanna Kuhn, Teacher's College, Columbia University; Mark Johnson, Birkbeck College/University College, London; and Helen Neville, University of Oregon. The discussant will be David Klahr, Carnegie Mellon.
Speakers on the final day of the symposium will examine the neural basis of developmental disorders, including dyslexia, autism and attention deficit disorder. They include: Albert Galaburda, Harvard Medical School; Patricia Carpenter and Marcel Just, Carnegie Mellon; and B. J. Casey, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The concluding discussant will be Michael I. Posner, University of Oregon.
The Carnegie Symposium Series is sponsored annually by the Department of Psychology. Past conferences have addressed the topics of consciousness, problem solving and implicit memory. This year is the first that CNBC has participated in organizing the conference. As in other years, all of the talks presented at this year's symposium will be incorporated into a book, which should be available next year.
The conference will be held on Carnegie Mellon's campus. Admission is free, and the public is welcome to attend. Those interested in attending should call Mary Anne Cowden at (412) 268-3151 for more information.