CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Varga, Alexandra Lucia |
|---|---|
| Title | A Formal Model of Infants' Acquisition of Practical Knowledge from Observation |
| Summary | The thesis is concerned with modelling observational learning as exhibited by infants in the above mentioned studies. The primary aim is to construct a process model that accounts for the empirical results from within the rationalist explanatory framework. I assume that young agents’ instrumental behavior is supported by practical reasoning processes; I justify this assumption by a review of empirical data from developmental psychology. The full-fledged model corroborates the developmentalists’ claim regarding the inferential support for imitative learning. It strengthens the argument that infants’ learning of practical skills and artifact functions from observation of adult human agents is an instance of teleological instrumental rationality. However the roles of perceptual, motor, or memory capacities of the human mind are also considered. The model is built in the thesis in two steps: first I spell out the proposed conceptualization of the processes that support infants’ performance in the head-touch task, and then I provide a technical depiction of those processes in the logic of choice. |
| Supervisor | Csibra, Gergely and Gergely, Csibra and van Lambalgen, Michiel |
| Department | Philosophy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/varga_alexandra-lucia.pdf |
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