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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: When is a simulation of a Y a Y? (Was Bag the Turing
Message-ID: <1995Jan16.184503.22009@news.media.mit.edu>
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Cc: minsky
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References: <3f3mrm$60m@transit.ai.mit.edu> <3f71sm$sth@tadpole.fc.hp.com> <D2IDIn.170@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 1995 18:45:03 GMT
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In article <D2IDIn.170@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <3f71sm$sth@tadpole.fc.hp.com> allsop@fc.hp.com writes:
>>
>>
>>Marvin said:
>>
>>> The psychologist Piaget found that it takes ten years or
>>> more for children to refine their abilities to imagine how the same
>>> scene will appear from different viewpoints.
>
>I don't think this is generally accepted nowadays.  See e.g.
>Margaret Donaldson's _Childrens Minds_ (something like that).
>The idea seems to be that children can do better than in
>Piaget's experiements if the setup is more familiar to them.
>
>-- jd


Good question. Can anyone out there summarize recent developments in
this field?  One problem is that children do each thing they do (I'm
pretty sure, anyway) in several different ways.  If a setup is
"familiar", that might mean that the child has had time also to
assemble a set of situation-based procedures for predicting
position-relation changes.  What Piaget found, as I recall,was that generally,
children under 7 years old would give wrong answers to questions like
--"[in such and such a situation] which animal would Jack say is
closest to him?"  That is, the subject would have trouble imagining
the other child's viewpoint.

I have not kept up with the literature in this, but when I was
current, I found that Piaget's critics tended to be excessively
absolutist: they would find a situation in which a child could be
well-trained to give "right answers" so regularly that they did appear
to have an adequate model.  However, when the situation was changed
even a little, they'd usually would revert to the more general -- but
less competent -- model typical to their age.  The critics, in their
pride at finding their labored counterexamples, seemed often to "throw
the baby out with the bath", in the sense of not appreciating the
pervasiveness of what Piaget discovered about general developmental
tendencies.  

In a popular myth, a famous child psychologist is said to have said,
"you can teach a three year old anthing you want, if you're willing to
spend several years at it." ;-)

