You are cordially invited to the seminar organized by the Department of Psychology.
Speaker: Dr. Gökhan Gönül (Post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Comparative Cognition at the Institute of Biology of the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
Title: Children are not immature adults: evidence from goal understanding, rational thinking, and mind-reading studies
Date: Wednesday, 28 February 2024
Time: 12:30
Place: C Block Amphitheater (T Building)
Abstract
Infants and children reach tremendous cognitive capacities in a short amount of time. Nevertheless, their world representation might be quite different from that of adults. On the one hand, developmental cognitive science has a growing tendency to ascribe adult-like cognitive traits to infants, evident from scientific publications on the topic in top-tier journals such as Science. On the other hand, some of the findings attributing higher-order cognitive capacities to infants could not be replicated. In this talk, I will argue that this growing trend to explain child cognition with theories heavily based on adult cognition can be called cognitive adultomorphism (attribution of adult-like cognitive characteristics to children). Based on the outcomes of my studies, I will give examples from three areas of research: goal understanding, rational thinking, and mind-reading studies. To support the claim, I will present our studies with children from a Western culture (Germany), and a remote Ugandan culture which is located close to a big rainforest.
Brief bibliography
Gökhan Gönül obtained his PhD in the Cognitive Science program at Middle East Technical University, with a focus on the cognitive, social, and perceptual-motor dimensions of tool-making in children. During his doctoral studies, he also conducted research at the University of Auckland, examining cross-cultural similarities and differences in joint tool-making among children from Turkey and New Zealand. Following the completion of his PhD, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. Currently, he holds a post-doctoral position at the Department of Comparative Cognition at the Institute of Biology of the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His current research focuses on the multidisciplinary exploration of social communication in children across diverse cultural contexts, as well as in apes.