Linda Smith | |
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Occupation(s) | Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Psychological and Brain Science, and of Cognitive Science |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Education | Ph.D. in Psychology |
Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin–Madison |
Academic work | |
Sub-discipline | Developmental Psychology,Cognitive Science |
Institutions | Indiana University |
Linda B. Smith (born 1951 [1] ) is an American developmental psychologist internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science,proposing,through theoretical and empirical studies,a new way of understanding developmental processes. [2] Smith's works are groundbreaking and illuminating for the field of perception,action,language,and categorization,showing the unique flexibility found in human behavior. [3] She has shown how perception and action are ways of obtaining knowledge for cognitive development and word learning. [4]
With Esther Thelen,she co-authored the books A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action [5] and A Dynamic Systems Approach to Development:Applications, [6] which approach child development from a dynamic systems perspective,including problems of continuity and discontinuities and nonlinear outcomes.
Smith is a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. [7]
Smith grew up in Portsmouth,NH as the second of five children. [19] Smith received her B.S. degree in Experimental Psychology at University of Wisconsin [13] (1973),doing her honor's thesis with Sheldon Ebenholtz. Smith completed her Ph.D. [13] at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. [7] She worked under the supervision of Deborah Kemler at University of Pennsylvania,studying the structure of perceptual experience,with a focus on the visual system. [19] In 1977,Smith joined Indiana University as faculty member in the universities new program in Developmental Psychology. [19] She subsequently chaired the Psychological and Brain Science Department at the institution. [3]
Smith's research interests include sensory-motor dynamics of attention and learning,word learning,and the development of visual object recognition in infancy and early childhood. Agencies supporting her work include the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. [20] Smith has served as member of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society. [21]
Smith's research examines developmental processes,and mechanisms of change,in perceptual,motor,cognitive,and language development in infancy and early childhood. Her work emphasizes how myriad skills are dependent on one another. For instance,an infant's ability to sit is connected to their ability to reach for objects,which in turn is connected to new ways of manipulating and viewing objects,which is connected to increased attention to the object's shape and the words used to name it. [3]
Together with Esther Thelen,Smith proposed a detailed theory of early perceptual,cognitive,and motor development based on dynamic systems. [22] Dynamic systems theory is a mathematical approach to understanding developmental processes,including evolution and culture,with cumulative incremental changes leading to increases in behavioral complexity over time. All adaptations within the system are a product of the prior state of the organism in interaction with a changing environment,with accumulated effects often leading to qualitative changes in the system. [3] According to this theory,development emerges from local environmental contingencies and internal dynamics of the system nested in different time scales. [3] Smith and Thelen emphasized the role of exploration and selection in the self-organization of perceptual-action (sensorimotor) categories,and the cascading interactions between perception,action,and attention over time. [2] This had a major impact on the field of psychology by introducing new ways of thinking about developmental processes. [4]
Smith is known for her research with Barbara Landau,Susan Jones,and others on the shape bias. [23] This term refers to children's tendency to extend usage of a newly introduced noun to other exemplars of the category on the basis of the shape of the object,rather than its color,texture,or material. [17] [2] Smith and her collaborators found that the shape bias emerges by age 3 years as a consequence of the child having acquired nouns that name categories of objects organized by shape. [24] Their studies revealed how young children transition from classifying objects by overall similarities to using dimensional qualities,e.g. color,size,or shape alone. [17] Such discoveries led Smith to develop a model of the effects of language on attention. [12] Smith and her collaborators diagnosed the origins,consequences and functionality of the shape bias in supporting vocabulary development. [3]
Eye-tracker technology allows a new and precise measure of the infant's perspective,and contributes to a better understanding of cognitive and visual development in infancy. Using head mounted eye-tracking,Smith and her colleagues identified changes in the infant's point of view that coincide with development in motor skills,such as the transition from sitting to crawling to walking,and linked changes in the infant's sensorimotor experience with their word learning. Viewing the world from the infant's point of view has increased understand of how everyday experiences contribute to learning. [2] [25]
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary,scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics,psychology,neuroscience,philosophy,computer science/artificial intelligence,and anthropology. It examines the nature,the tasks,and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior,with a focus on how nervous systems represent,process,and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language,perception,memory,attention,reasoning,and emotion;to understand these faculties,cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics,psychology,artificial intelligence,philosophy,neuroscience,and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization,from learning and decision to logic and planning;from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
A cognitive model is an approximation of one or more cognitive processes in humans or other animals for the purposes of comprehension and prediction. There are many types of cognitive models,and they can range from box-and-arrow diagrams to a set of equations to software programs that interact with the same tools that humans use to complete tasks. In terms of information processing,cognitive modeling is modeling of human perception,reasoning,memory and action.
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing,conceptual resources,perceptual skill,language learning,and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize,understand,and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives,thinks,and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are,reasoning,intelligence,language,and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old,they play with toys,listen to their parents speak,they watch TV,anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.
Domain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized,presumably evolutionarily specified,learning devices. The position is a close relative of modularity of mind,but is considered more general in that it does not necessarily entail all the assumptions of Fodorian modularity. Instead,it is properly described as a variant of psychological nativism. Other cognitive scientists also hold the mind to be modular,without the modules necessarily possessing the characteristics of Fodorian modularity.
Preferential looking is an experimental method in developmental psychology used to gain insight into the young mind/brain. The method as used today was developed by the developmental psychologist Robert L. Fantz in the 1960s.
Infant cognitive development is the first stage of human cognitive development,in the youngest children. The academic field of infant cognitive development studies of how psychological processes involved in thinking and knowing develop in young children. Information is acquired in a number of ways including through sight,sound,touch,taste,smell and language,all of which require processing by our cognitive system. However,cognition begins through social bonds between children and caregivers,which gradually increase through the essential motive force of Shared intentionality. The notion of Shared intentionality describes unaware processes during social learning at the onset of life when organisms in the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development do not maintain communication via the sensory system.
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition,children's development of concepts,conceptual changes over time,and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants,toddlers,adults,and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).
Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development,cognitive psychology and cognitive science,and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018),one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition,which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Renée Baillargeon is a Canadian American research psychologist. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy.
Amanda Woodward is Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences and the William S. Gray Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Her research investigates infant social cognition and early language development including the understanding of goal-directed actions,agency,theory of mind,and learning from social partners. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Attentional control,colloquially referred to as concentration,refers to an individual's capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. It is also known as endogenous attention or executive attention. In lay terms,attentional control can be described as an individual's ability to concentrate. Primarily mediated by the frontal areas of the brain including the anterior cingulate cortex,attentional control is thought to be closely related to other executive functions such as working memory.
Esther Thelen was an expert in the field of developmental psychology. Thelen's research was focused on human development,especially in the area of infant development.
Philip Kellman is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and the current Cognitive Area Chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of California,Los Angeles. He is also Adjunct Professor of Surgery in the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine,and the founder of Insight Learning Technology,Inc,a company that applies perceptual learning,adaptive learning technology,and principles from cognitive science research to improve education and training. His research interests involve perception and visual cognition,specifically visual perception of objects,shape,space,and motion,and perceptual development. He is also an expert in perceptual learning,adaptive learning,and their applications to skill acquisition and educational technology.
Kelly S. Mix is an American developmental psychologist known for her research on the development of numerical concepts and their origins in infancy and toddlerhood. She is professor and chair of the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland. Mix was awarded the Boyd McCandless Early Career Award in 2002 for her innovative research on the early emergence of numerocity. Her co-authored book Quantitative Development in Infancy and Early Childhood,with Janellen Huttenlocher and Susan Cohen Levine,provides an overview of the early development of quantitative reasoning and mathematical concepts. Her co-edited book The Spatial Foundations of Language and Cognition, with Linda B. Smith and Michael Gasser,examines the role of space in structuring human cognition.
Larissa Samuelson is an American psychologist known for her exploration in the fields of word learning,cognitive development,and the use of dynamic systems as a framework for understanding the developmental process. She is Professor at the School of Psychology of the University of East Anglia.
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932,publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination,by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson,with her husband James J. Gibson,created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development,which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments. Perhaps her most well-known contribution to psychology was the "visual cliff," which studied depth perception in both human and animal species,leading to a new understanding of perceptual development in infants. Gibson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971,the National Academy of Education in 1972,and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1992,she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Lisa Feigenson is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development. Feigenson is known for her research on the development of numerical abilities,working memory,and early learning. She has served on the editorial board of Cognition and the Journal of Experimental Psychology:General.
Fei Xu is an American developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist who is currently a professor of psychology and the director of the Berkeley Early Learning Lab at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on cognitive and language development,from infancy to middle childhood.
Lorraine E. Bahrick is a developmental psychologist known for her research on intermodal perception and effects of inter-sensory redundancy on learning in infancy and early childhood. Her work in these areas involves investigating how the integration of information from various sensory modalities,such as vision,hearing,and touch,contributes to the cognitive,perceptual,and social development of infants and children. She also explores how the redundancy or overlap of sensory information,influences these developmental processes. She is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Florida International University and the Director of Infant Development Lab.
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