We live in a dynamic world. To adapt to the changing environment, mental manipulation serves as a critical operation to keep our representation of the world up-to-date. Mental manipulation plays an important role in facilitating STEM aptitude and abstract thinking. In this talk, I will use mental manipulation of object representations as a case study to show how mental manipulation operates and develops in the early years. In the first part, I will talk about the developmental trajectories of mental manipulations that arise from visual inputs: how do infants and children track objects over time and space? In the second part, I will present findings on manipulating representations that arise from computations. I will also discuss some future directions that further our understanding of mental manipulation as a cognitive foundation for human intelligence in early development.
Dr. Chen Cheng is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Boston University. She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Prior to that, she has received the Master's degree in Developmental Psychology from East China Normal University and the Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Zhejiang University. She studies cognitive development in infants and children. Her research program focuses on understanding how infants and children form representations of objects and use the representations to support cognition and learn about the world.
Remarks
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