Mechanistic Developmental Process: Rumelhart Prize Symposium in Honor of Linda Smith

Mechanistic Developmental Process: Rumelhart Prize Symposium in Honor of Linda Smith Participants Larissa K. Samuelson (larissa-samuelson@uiowa.edu) Anthony Morse (anthony.morse@plymouth.ac.uk) Chen Yu (chenyu@indiana.edu) Eliana Colunga (colunga@psych.colorado.edu) Department of Psychology and DeLTA Center University of Iowa Iowa City, IA, 52242 Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems, Plymouth University Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA, UK Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Indiana University Bloomington, IN, 47405 Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder Boulder, CO, 80309 Thomas Hills (T.T.Hills@warwick.ac.uk) Department of Psychology University of Warwick Coventry CV4 A word learning; computational models; robotics; dynamic systems. Motivation Traditional views of cognition, cognitive development, and word learning have viewed knowledge as divorced from processes of perceiving and acting. Linda Smith has championed a dynamic, mechanistic, and process- oriented view of cognition and focused on questions of development. She has shown how knowledge is embedded in, distributed across, and inseparable from the processes of perceiving and acting in the world. In so doing, she has enabled a new understanding of the nature of cognition and of how new ways of thinking come to be. This Rumelhart symposium in her honor illustrates how this focus on developmental process changes the questions asked and our resulting understanding of cognition. The five speakers will examine the developmental process of word learning from different vantage points ranging from perceptual to social to cognitive, and spanning multiple periods from the first words to rapid vocabulary growth to the building of semantic networks. A Unified View of Early Word Learning: Linking social interaction to sensory-motor Dynamics in Child-Parent Interaction Author: Chen Yu with Daniel Yurovsky Abstract: Many theories of early word learning begin with the uncertainty inherent to learning a word from its co- occurrence with a visual scene. However, the relevant visual scene for infant word learning is neither from the adult theorist’s view nor the mature partner’s view, but is rather from the learner’s personal view. To understand the mechanistic nature of early word learning, this talk focuses on micro-level behaviors as they unfold in real time in the dynamically complex interactions of child-parent interactions. We found that when infants interacted with Smart Behaviors from Simple Processes Author: Larissa Samuelson Abstract: The period between16-months and 3-years of age is one of rapid vocabulary growth and diversification. Children this age are often referred to as “amazing word