[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