[music]
>>LINDA SMITH: I wonder if you remember the traditional song "Dem Bones?"
We used to sing it when I was a child and it goes something like this.
"The toe bone is connected to the foot bone, the foot bone's connected to the thigh bone,
the thigh bone's connected to the knee bone," and on and on and it had this wonderful refrain,
"dem bones, dem bones are gonna walk around."
Well I want to present you with a remix, and the remix goes like this.
"The sitting's connected to the holding, the holding's connected to the object, the object's
connected to the seeing, the seeing's connected to the learning," and my refrain is "those
babies, those babies are gonna learn."
It's all connected because the way babies move determines what they see and what they
see determines what they learn.
And because the way babies move changes dramatically in the first year and half of life.
So what a number of researchers have been doing is they have been putting head cameras
on babies in an effort to get a "baby's eye view" of the world and to understand how the
way they move and how the way changes in movement give them the experiences from which they
learn.
So let's watch a few of these.
So this here is a four month old and she's laying on the ground batting at objects.
And four month olds get to see pretty much whatever their parents put in front of them
or wherever their parents put their heads.
Not bad views, but next this is an eleven month old crawler.
And what does that crawler see – dirt spots on the floor, mom's socks, table legs, stop
off at a distance, now a nice view of some interesting toys.
This is a very, very different view.
This is a view about space, about near and far but only low space OK.
Alright, now I want to show you another one, next I'm going to show you a similarly aged
child to the crawler.
The crawler was an eleven month old this next one is a twelve month old.
But this twelve month old is sitting on the floor and is playing and this is a very different
view.
The child is sitting, holding an object in a sustained way, that object is visually foregrounded,
a lot of time is spent thinking and looking at that object.
And what developmental researchers are coming to understand is that sitting and holding
objects so that you look at them from multiple perspectives is a critical component in early
development.
One reason why it's really important is because sitting and holding and object allows you
to see in an intergraded and dynamic way one view after another, the multiple views of
objects.
And research is telling us that those experiences of seeing an object from multiple views actually
teaches the visual object recognition system, enabling children to perceive objects, recognize
them from multiple perspectives and to be better able to recognize them in clutter.
So, for the first part of our song, the sitting's connected to the holding and the multiple
views of objects, and that's connected to visual object recognition and to recognizing
objects in the complicated context of everyday life when they are from multiple views and
when they are in clutter.
Sitting and holding an object also visually isolates that object.
Babies have very short arms, and you can think of that as a feature, not a bug, when they
hold objects they are close, foregrounded, blocking their views of other objects.
These make visually wonderful moments for learning.
So in collaboration with Chen Yu we have been looking at how word learning relates to the
visual experiences of babies in the laboratory.
And what we do in those studies is we put head cameras on babies and also on the mothers
and we have them play with objects at a table.
The objects are all novel, the kind of objects that babies have never seen before, but we
teach the moms the names of those objects prior to the playing event.
So, mom and baby play at the table, and the mom will name the objects, periodically, with
the names that we taught the mom.
Then after the play session we go in and test whether children have learned those object
names.
How do we test them?
We put a bunch of objects on the table, actually two to three, and we say where's the "mody,"
get the "mody," if they get the one that is the "mody" they get credit for learning that
object name.
Alright.
Then we can take all the object names that the babies learned by our measure and all
the object names that by our measure that the baby did not learn and we can go back
in and look at the head camera videos from those play sessions and we can ask what, what
visually did a naming moment look like when the baby learn the object name, and what visually
did the naming moment look like when the baby did not learn the object name.
A good naming moment has for the baby learning the name has very specific visual properties.
A good naming moment is a moment and when the object is being named is big in the child's
view, close, in which there are very few other objects in view and which it's centered in
the visual field.
A not so good naming moment is one in which there are lots of objects on the table, the
objects that are being named, the green one in this example, might not be centered, might
be over lapping with the other objects, OK?
Another property of a good naming moment is not just the visual properties, but the fact
that the child is holding it.
So, it's a good naming moment when you have visual isolation and the child is holding
it.
That is the moment in which the baby might learn the object name.
It is not such a good naming moment when you have very similar visual properties but the
mother holding the object.
Now why should that be?
The reason why it should be is that when the baby is holding an object, it sets up what
is called a "perception action move" and they stabilize the head and attention on the object.
Just watch this video here.
The baby is not holding the object, just sort of moving around, mucking around, and objects
are coming in and out of view all through head movements.
Babies move their heads a lot.
Now watch this one, very same child, just a couple moments later.
OK.
Now he's holding the object and holding it and looking at it in a way that leads to sustained
attention on the objects and the detail properties of the objects, including its size.
So, as I said, this is what researchers call a "perception action move," the perceiving
of holding results in sustained sent of attention on the object of interest and this leads to
learning.
So, what have we got?
Back to my song again – my connection song.
We have the sittings connected to the holding, the holdings connected to the visual foregrounding
and the holding is connected to a still and stabilized head and that's connected to object
name learning.
Now in the world when children hear some object name, they don't get just one instance – this
is a duck – they might hear "that's a duck," "this is a duck," "that's a duck," and "all
the various things are ducks."
And the other thing we know is that by learning object names such as this, children build
internal representations of the geometric structure of object shape, and these representations
of object shape also help them recognize objects in clutter and help them more rapidly learn
object names.
But they're also connected to another delightful aspect of human development.
And let me just show you one little video of that delightful aspect.
Here's a cute little girl using a bowl as a hat.
OK, so this kind of pretend play, using one object for another, it's called object substitution,
is very highly studied in development psychology in part because it's so engaging and so inventive.
And just some examples that children in the literature – children have used sticks as
bottles, boxes as beds, they've use little shoes as boats or cars to drive around little
toys in, and so pretend play of this kind is interesting because it is just charming,
but it's also interesting because it's a very important marker of future language development
using one object as a stand in for another or being another object, like you might be
an airplane, – that emerges at the same time as the name explosion in children when
vocabulary really accelerates in terms of learning of object names.
And it also is a very strong predictor of future language success.
So if you were a parent and you had a 24-month-old who wasn't talking much and you bought that
child into the clinic, and the clinician observed them engage in this kind of symbolic play,
they would be more confident this child was going to catch up.
But if you bought the child with the same vocabulary into the clinic, they weren't quite
talking yet, but they don't engage in this type of play they would be a little more concerned.
So, what's interesting from our visual object recognition point of view is that this geometry,
representing the geometry of three-dimensional shape, is sort of whole object representation,
is the underling skill that enables children to do these kinds of object substitutions,
and therefore engage in that kind of pretend play.
So, to bring us to a close here, we have the sitting is connecting to the holding, the
holdings connected to multiple views that teaches you to recognize objects from multiple
perspectives, and, to recognize them in clutter, but the holding is also through sustained
attention and visual isolation, connected to object learning names and learning object
names also teaches the visual object recognition system, building more robust representations
of object shape, and this leads us to pretend play and fantasy.
In development, it is all connected – this is just one story – but human development,
human cognitive development, it's like the ecology.
Everything that happens lays a foundation for what happens next and feeds into the next
thing.
You really cannot isolate the components because they're all building, building change together.
And so I would like to thank all my collaborators, many of whom are from right here.
Thank you.
[clapping]