Cognitive Studies Comps Papers
Related Documents
- "Putting the Baby Down": The Role of Physical Proximity in Mother-Infant Vocal Communication (438919 KB PDF Document)10 June 2005A new theory by anthropologist Dean Falk suggests that infant-directed speech (IDS) evolved in humans' hominin ancestors as a communication technique whereby foraging mothers could vocally keep in touch with infants out of their physical control. Crying is proposed also to have evolved at this time for infants to signal to their distant mothers the need to reestablish physical contact. To investigate the current potential effects of physical proximity and separation on mothers' IDS and infants' crying, a study comprised of a questionnaire on caregiving practices and an observation session with physical distance and physical proximity conditions was conducted with 10 mother-infant pairs. It was hypothesized that mothers' IDS would be more exaggerated (wider F0 range) while physically separated from their infants during the observation session in the lab. Also, mothers who spend more time in daily life physically separated from their infants were expected to exhibit more exaggerated IDS and to have infants who cry more than mothers who spend more time in physical contact with their infants. Though results did not reach significance, they showed trends in the expected directions, suggesting that further research of this sort might lend support to Falk's theory of why IDS originated as a linguistic phenomenon in the human species.
- Architecture of Mind and World: How Urban Form Influences Spatial Cognition (1661405 KB PDF Document)1 May 2005We all require spatial knowledge of our environment. Many people spend the better part of their day in a built environment, and therefore, much of their thought about space is directly intertwined with the architectural and urban form of their surroundings. How does the form of people's surroundings affect their spatial knowledge? Tversky (1981, 1992) has demonstrated that people's spatial knowledge is systematically distorted by the use of heuristics to simplify alignment and rotation information. A set of computational techniques known as space syntax (Bafna, 2003) can be used to formally describe an environment. This study pairs such an analysis of a case study environment with results from spatial judgment and memory tasks. Findings suggest that space syntax measures significantly predict people's performance on those tasks.