Bornstein & Suess (2000).
HD FS 631: Learning & Cognitive
Development
Physiological self-regulation and
information processing in infancy:
Cardiac vagal tone and habituation.
Child Development, 71, 273-287.
Vygotskian Theory & Research
Susan Hegland
September 16, 2002
“Great thoughts spring from the heart”
Vauvenargues (1746)
Background:
Habituation & Self-Regulation
•
• Habituation (boredom at repeated stimulus) reflects
learning;
•
– Varies among infants
– Controversy exists: nature, meaning, source
• Systems perspective:
Self-regulation & attention
Processes are complex neurophysiological system
–
•
– Multiple distal and proximal forces mutually influence origins,
status, growth of habituation
–
–
• Performance in habituation tasks must reflect self regulatory processes that support appropriate responses
to environment, i.e.,
–
•
• Habituation efficiency would combine
–
– Individual differences component
– Time-locked organismic component
Goals
• To understand role of physiological selfregulation in habituation and test
performance in early infancy:
• Evaluate temporal relatedness of
physiological regulation & habituation
efficiency
• Assess individual differences in stability
of each process & predictive validity
– within each age
– across ages
V (Vagal), NA (nucleus ambiguus): central vagal complex
Vna are inhibitory: slowing heart & modulating sympathetic
influences
Under stress: vagal brake withdrawn, CVT declines
•
– Psychological processes: cardiac reactivity; executive attention
– Underlying neurophysiological substrates
• When child can self -regulate, habituation efficiency
improves
Continuous feedback between central nervous system and
autonomic nervous system influences
Porges four-level hierarchical model of physiological selfregulation involving regulation of homeostatic processes from
cardiac to facial expressions
Polyvagal Theory: neuroanatomical /neurophysiological
justifies looking to autonomic measure of cardiac vagal tone to
index self-regulation
•
Increased cardiac output: oxygen transferred to brain for cognit ive
processing
Facilitates rapid engagement/disengagement with changing
environment
Infants with higher baseline Vna show
• More novelty responsiveness
• Shorter visual fixations
Vagal withdrawals lead to heart rate increase to support
enhanced metabolic, cognitive, and behavioral demands of the
task
Predictions
• Baseline V na will be related to measures of
attention at each age
– accumulated looking time
– novelty responsiveness to external stimuli
• Greater suppression of Vna will be related to
concurrently measured habituation efficiency
– Indicates that vagal regulation supports
information processing
• Measures of physiological regulation
(baseline Vna; suppression of Vna) will
predict habituation efficiency
– Within age & across ages
– Habituation efficiency will NOT predict Vna!
1
Participants
Procedure
• 81 infants (equal number of boys & girls)
– Randomly recruited from patients of private physicians
(pediatricians & ob’s)
– Term and healthy at birth
– Remained healthy through study
– Free of known neurological or visual abnormalities
– Middle- to upper SES levels ( Hollingshead 4-factor Index)
• Seen in lab when infants were 2 and 5 months of age
• Mothers completed family description questionnaire one
week before visit
•
•
– 81 infants at Time 1
– 79 infants at Time 2
–
•
Results
– infant fussed or
– mother interrupted testing conditions
– Habituation criterion less than 1 second.
• At two months, 69% habituated on 1 of 2 tasks
– No difference in gender, birth weight, SES, age, Vna baseline
– Longitudinal analyses conducted for whole sample and for
habituators only
• Correlations:
– Significant negative r between 2-mo. baseline V na and ALT (r =
-.26, p < .05)
– 2 mo. olds: Significant r between change V na and ALT
(r = .40, p < .01)
• Hierarchical regressions
– Mean ALT was not stable (r = .14) from 2 to 5 months
– For infants who habituated on one task or the other, the addition
of task 1 change V na resulted in significant R2 change of .12 [F
(1, 44) = 6.38, p < .05) for 5 mo. ALT
• Corrections for attenuation, change Vna predicts ALT (r =
.97) better than ALT predicts change in Vna (r = .34)
Significance of Findings
• Consistent relation between change V na and
ALT is important: demonstrates
interdependence of physiological selfregulation and efficient information
processing.
• Physiological component of self-regulation
plays increasingly central role in habituation
efficiency as infant develops in first 6 months.
• Therefore, withdrawal of vagal inhibitory
influences on heart during visual habituation
likely facilitates shift of metabolic resources to
support information processing, behavioral
inhibition, state control
Five minutes of baseline ECG recording while mother
talked and showed toy to infant
Measuring vagal influences to the heart originating in the
nucleus ambiguus
Two visual habituation-test tasks
–
–
–
–
•
Mother in adjacent room; infant alert and sated
Two sets of complex 2-dimensional geometric figures
One experimenter scored infant looking on-line
One experimenter monitored/controlled collection of visual
& physiological data
Habituation:
–
–
• Looking data not considered if
Baseline recording physiological activity
Visual testing & recording of physiological activity
Physiological activity
–
– Health
– Demographics
• All infants who completed a task and had baseline ECG
data were included in analyses
Two parts for infant:
1.
2.
Look away for 2 1 s. intervals;
2 consecutive looks, each less than 50% baseline
Discussion
• Baseline Vna related to ALT at both ages
– Infants with higher baseline Vna at 2 & 5 mos.
were shorter lookers overall in visual attn task
• Magnitude of suppression of Vna from baseline to
visual task consistently associated with habituation
efficiency.
– When infants did NOT habituate in 2 min., no
relation between change Vn a and ALT
• ALT not consistently stable and did not predict
baseline or change Vn a within age or between ages
– Change Vna was stable across tasks within age,
for habituators & nonhabituators
– NOT stable from 2 to 5 months of age
– ALT & NR uncorrelated: represent independent
processes
– NR may be reflexive in young infants (depend on
hippocampus)
Feedback on sample questions
• What question are you answering?
Stick to the point!
• Organize: intro, one paragraph per point (with
theory/research support), conclusion
• Explain how each citation supports your
argument
• Distinguish between theory and research
(see syllabus, p. 6; Bjorklund, p. 46-47)
• Most sophisticated answers:
– some evidence supports each side (cite)
– Majority of current evidence (e.g., Brown, Smith)
supports this position…
• Avoid quotes; paraphrase
2
Your research papers
• Wait until you’ve read more of Bjorklund
before choosing a topic
• To test your hypotheses, you will
– Design a method, choose participants and
materials
– make up data, which is represented in tables,
graphs, and statistics (not individual participants)
• You will submit two copies of your paper for
blind review by other class members
• You will respond to the reviewers’
suggestions by revising and resubmitting
your manuscript
1. Compare sociocultural perspectives to
developmental biological perspectives
Vygotsky:
• Multiple aspects of child’s endowment must
be viewed in interaction
• Goal: to understand how changing organisms
develop in changing environments
– Inadequate to focus on individual or on
environment
Vygotsky
Developmental Theory
&
Applications
Direct Instruction:
Adults transmit knowledge
Adult
Child
• Current implementation:
Study development in social/cultural context
• Research example: Kevin Miller (1995):
influence of language on number learning
Piagetian & Constructivists:
Children construct knowledge
Thorndike (1928)
Social Constructivists: Learning
occurs as adults and children
interact
Adult
Adult
Child
Piaget
Child
Child
Child
Child
Child
Child
Haitano
3
Sociocultural Theories:
Learning occurs as adults and
children interact around activities
Adult
Child
Child
Child
Examples of
sociocultural learning
• Examples of research:
– Rogoff: guided participation (mothers &
toddlers in four cultures: US, Turkey, India,
Guatemala)
– Saxe (mothers and preschoolers doing math)
– Greenfield (Mexican mothers and daughters
weaving)
– vygphoto.ppt
Child
Child
Child
Rogoff
Scaffolding:
Language guided learning
• Extends current skills and knowledge to
higher level of competence
• Enables children to complete complex
mental tasks they could not complete
without assistance
Social Transaction
Fundamental vehicle of development and
education
3 concepts needed for learning by
transaction:
• Props
– Instruments that enable child to go beyond
present level of development
• Processes that make child sensitive
• Procedures used by tutor to ease way
Example: child-directed language
(aka “motherese”)
•
•
•
•
•
•
Exaggerated stress
Simpler segmentation
Reduced syntactic complexity
Error-free learning
Child is permitted to do as much as s/he can
What child can’t do is filled in by mother’s
(parent’s) scaffolding
• Chomsky’s L.A.D. needs Vygotsky’s L.A.S.S.
Role of the Tutor
(Wood, Bruner, & Ross)
• Model the task:
– establish that something is possible and interesting
•
•
•
•
•
Induce the child to try
Reduce the number of degrees of freedom
Child does what s/he can
Tutor fills in the remainder
Limits the complexity of the task to the level the
child can manage
4
Dialogue enables child to
represent linguistically the
task
“Given - new contract” (Haviland,et al)
•
• Given is unstressed, unmarked
– Shared, understood background
• New is stressed, marked, fully nominalized
• Means of language to enable adult to pull child
into proximal zone
• When internalized, becomes a system for
distinguishing given (known) from unknown
(problematic, new, uncertain)
Scaffolding around conceptual
understanding
• From information sharing
– communicating raw material for constructing
understanding
In collaborative environment
Children internalize
• knowledge of content
• strategies
• thinking dispositions
Wertsch: Transitions from
other-regulated to selfregulated
First level: fails to interpret adult utterance
•
• Second level:
• To mediated learning
– learners gradually take responsibility and
control of learning
– child responds to specific questions and comments,
– fails to understand full implications of utterances
• Third level
– Child follows nonexplicit directives
– Transition from other-regulated to self -regulation
– Still interpsychological plane of functioning
• Research examples: Tudge, Azmitia,
Whitehurst
• Fourth level: intrapsychological
Modeling
Scaffolding strategies
•
•
•
•
•
•
Modeling
Contingency managing
Feeding back
Instructing
Questioning
Cognitive structuring
•
•
•
•
T. writes 10
20
30 on board
“Why do I think this is a pattern?
“It looks as if I add 10....”
“I know that a pattern is something that
happens over all over...”
• “So I’m thinking, ‘If I’m ... each time, I must
have a pattern.’ “
• “That’s the kind of thinking I want you to do.”
• “I’m going to use the overhead and chips to
start the pattern.”
5
Two types of modeling
• From total modeling
• To assisted modeling
– Identifying the steps of the thinking process
– Helping children apply knowledge to new
situations
Instructing
• “Check your work. Make sure that...”
• “Remember, think big, count little.”
• “So, to be a mathematical thinker, I
have to be reflective. That means I
take time to think, to understand the
problem, and to find a strategy that
will help me solve the problem.”
• “Then I have to check my answer.”
Cognitive structuring
• Breaking task into manageable steps
• Always ask questions in same sequence
to guide children’s stages
Feeding back
• Gives specific feedback
• Describes child behavior (strategy) and
outcome
• Sets up students to take more responsibility
• Identifies essential task components
• “You used what you know about patterns--that
a pattern repeats over and over again.”
Questioning
• Specific questions that child can repeat to self
to complete similar tasks
• Encourages self-monitoring
• T: “Ask yourself if the number you added
makes sense. Does it follow the pattern?”
• “What groups would I take away...? Think
carefully. What do you need to think about
first?”
Examples
• Bereiter: Cognitive apprenticeship in
reading and writing
• Brown & Palinczar: Reciprocal Teaching
• Hatano: Science Instruction
6
2. Compare/contrast Rogoff’s guided
participation in pre/post industrial
societies
• Three lenses for three planes of
analysis:
– Personal
– Interpersonal
– Community/institutional planes
• rogoff.ppt
Pre- vs post industrial cultures
• Rogoff: 1993 monograph: contrast between
“information-age cultures” and more agrarian
cultures
– Culturally important information received in /out
context of skilled activity
• Verbal vs nonverbal instruction
• Structure to foster involvement in learning,
including motivation
• Specific instruction vs instruction through
modeling
• Emphasis on listening vs emphasis on
observing
Social Influences on Cognition
• Thinking is at root an activity
• Thinking is intimately related to and depends
on both internal and overt speech
• Thinking develops and is maintained through
interpersonal experience
• To know the status of children’s cognitive
development,
one must observe their responses to
instruction
• Contrast with Piaget
Guided Participation =
• Adult-child interactions
– During explicit instruction
– During routine activities & communication in
everyday life
• “The process and system of involvement
of individuals with others, as they
communicate and engage in shared
activities”
3. How to assess cognitive
development from sociocultural
perspective?
• Individual response emerges from collective life
• Any function in child’s cultural development
– first in a social context: interpsychological
– second: within the child: intrapsychological
• Examples:
– voluntary attention
– logical memory
– concept formation
Zone of Proximal Development
• Distance between the level of actual
development
– as determined by independent problem
solving
• and the level of potential development
– as determined through problem solving under
adult guidance or
– in collaboration with more capable peers
7
Assessing and planning
scaffolded instruction
Developmental Outcome: Count 10 objects
Beyond child’s capabilities:
counting beyond 5
Assessing
ZPD for
Jeremy S.
ZPD:
Child counts five objects, touching
and counting each object only once!
Child accomplishes without help:
states numerals from one to five
ZPD versus IQ
• Learning is interpersonal:
a dynamic social event
• ZPD is domain specific
• ZPD is identified by a combination of static
and dynamic tests
• ZPD provides positive guide to where
instruction pays off
• Research examples: Brown & Palinczar
Vygotsky
Strengths & Limits of Vygotsky
Strengths
• Focus on interaction between tutors and
learners
• Processes of interaction
Limits
• Scaffolding limited to apprenticeship skills
• Limited descriptions of group scaffolding
(see Hatano)
Next week
• Research example of Vygotskian: Duncan
& Cheyne (Elaine)
• Piaget
8