[Please excuse multiple copies]
We would like to invite you to the annual Macnamara Lecture, which will
take place at 3:30pm on Friday November 30 in Room 112 of the Rutherford
Physics Building (3600 University). The speaker this year will be Mark
Sabbagh (Queen's University). Mark studies how young children think about
the beliefs and thoughts that other people have, that is, young children's
"theory of mind", with a focus on the roles of socio-cultural factors and
neurobiological underpinnings of their theory-of-mind skills.
The title of his talk: Preschoolers' changing minds
Abstract: During the preschool years, children's explicit understandings
of the world go through dramatic changes. I will review the work that we
have done investigating how neurobiological factors interact with
particular kinds of experience to promote change in children's naive
psychological understandings, or their "theory of mind". These findings
provide evidence that neurodevelopmental factors act as a rate-limiting
factor on the extent to which preschoolers can use their experiences to
drive conceptual change. However, I will also present some recent evidence
from our lab suggesting that, at least with respect to theory of mind
understandings, biology and experience might be even more tightly
integrated. Specifically, some kinds of experience may induce biological
changes that support theory of mind reasoning both transiently and in the
long term. Together, these findings help us to understand how deep
connections between biology and experience shape conceptual development
during the preschool years.
[Please forward this message to anyone who might be interested, such as
your unit's email list.]
Thank you,
Joyce Macnamara and Al Bregman
