What: The Physics Education Research Group in the Department of Physics holds an (almost) weekly seminar that hosts speakers from diverse fields such as science education, psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology.

When: Seminars usually begin at 4:00 PM every Wednesday during the Fall 2008 Semester

Where: Seminars are usually held in the Physics Department in room 1304

Confirmed Speakers For Fall 2008:

November 19: Linda B. Smith from the Cognitive Development Lab at Indiana University

"Thinking and learning close to the sensory-motor surface creates knowledge that transcends the here-and-now"

Cognition, behavior, and development all happen in real time, through sensory-motor interactions with a physical world. In his classic theory of the emergence of cognition, Piaget proposed that infant cognition was grounded in these sensory-motor interactions and, indeed, limited by its very sensory-motor nature. One phenomenon that Piaget used to illustrate these ideas was the object concept as manifested in a task that has come to be known as the A not-B task. Infant’s perseverative searches for hidden objects in that task suggested object representations tightly tied to the here and now of perceiving and acting. In this talk, I will present evidence that Piaget was right; infant performance in the classic tasks used to measure the object concept are deeply tied to sensory-motor processes. I will then argue and present evidence that this seeming example of the sensory-motor nature of immature is revealing about a fundamental aspect of all of human cognition and its tie to the physical world through the sensory-motor system. In making this case, I will present an overview of the dynamic field model, new evidence on infant performance in the A-not-B task, and an extension of that model to and new evidence on children’s binding of names to objects. 

December 3: Robert Lent, Department of Counseling and Personnel Services, University of Maryland 

Tentative Speakers for Spring 2009:

April 23rd: Anna Sfard, Division of Science and Mathematics Education, University of Haifa, Israel

Feb 5th: Chandralekha Singh, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh

Megan Bang, TERC, Cambridge, MA (February-ish)

Date TBD: Janet Coffey, Curriculum & Instruction, University of Maryland

Seminars of interest elsewhere on campus

Cognitive science colloquium, Thursdays 3:30-5:30, Biosciences Research Building 1103

Tentative Speakers for the 2009-2010 Academic Year

Steve Pollock, Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder