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Café Scientifique of Iowa City, IA
is a meeting where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a
slice of cheesecake, anyone can come to explore and debate the
latest ideas in science, mathematics, medicine and technology.
Café Scientifique of Iowa City is typically held at the Cottage Bakery and Cafe in downtown Iowa City on the second Thursday of the month from September to May.
Next Meeting: |
Café Scientifique of Iowa City is organized and managed by Vincent Rodgers. The co-organizers are Usha Balakrishnan, Debra Pughe and Dale Stille.
Prof. Larissa
Samuelson
Department of Psychology
“How
Are Children Able to Learn Vocabulary So Quickly?”
Any parent can tell you that it's amazing how quickly
children are able to associate words with objects. For example, children
quickly recognize that a toy airplane and a real Boeing 747 are both
"airplanes". In our research, we want to know how children are able to be so
adept at this difficult task. One of the things we have learned is that some
of the skill children show in learning new words comes from discovering
patterns among the words they already know. So the issue of learning new
words is made easier by biases that reduce the problem to a smaller size.
The research presented here examines the relation between the attentional
biases young children demonstrate in laboratory with their learning skills
in the outside world. Data from two neural network simulations and two
experimental studies with 15-21-month-old children suggests that attentional
biases in laboratory are a generalization of what young children have
already learned. Furthermore, if one changes the nouns young children
already know both the attentional biases they demonstrate in the laboratory
and their vocabulary development outside the laboratory changes.
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THE IOWA CITY CAFE SCIENTIFIQUE