Abstract:
Through acting on objects and observing others do so, human babies are presented with a flux of examples in everyday life about how objects and people interact with one another. Rapid learning in infancy and early childhood suggests powerful mechanisms at work for data organization and knowledge acquisition. In this talk, I present three sets of studies that demonstrate the effects of hands-on experiences and cultural contexts on early learning. The first line of work showed that active exploration, including playing with objects or making their own choices, sharpened infants’ perception and understanding of physical and social events. The second line of work, with a cultural lens, showed that infants needed fewer examples to learn a new concept through hands-on exploration with caregivers than observation only. Moreover, cross-cultural variation in parental guidance during the learning process pointed to diverse pathways for knowledge acquisition. The third line of work examines how young children co- construct a new context for learning through technology-mediated play. Together, these findings provide empirical evidence towards a cultural understanding of how infants learn.
Bio:
Su-hua Wang received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her doctoral research involved experimental work on infant cognition and ethnographic work on family storytelling with toddlers. She is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research examines how early learning is shaped, in diverse ways, by children’s participation in cultural practices and their interaction with caregivers and cultural materials such as toys, books, and technology. She is the co-founder and director of UCSC’s New Gen Learning, an interdisciplinary research consortium for studying the strengths that children from racially or linguistically marginalized backgrounds bring to learning. Her work is funded by NIH, NSF, and the Spencer Foundation. （webpage）