Jedediah WP Allen

Bilkent University · Department of Psychology

There is a large body of empirical work that has investigated the relationship between parents’ child-directed speech and their children’s Theory of Mind development. That such a relationship should exist is well motivated from both Theory Theory and Socio-Cultural (SC) perspectives. Despite this general convergence, we argue that theoretical diffe...

Nativist and empiricist approaches require foundationalism because they cannot account for the emergence of representation. Foundationalism is the assumption of an innate representational base. In turn, foundationalism places limits on the nature of learning as a constructivist process. In contrast, action-based approaches can account for the emerg...

Human culture is seen as more cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is the over-imitation hypothesis—that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper we analyze the current state of th...

Epistemic reflection involves the creation of qualitatively new knowledge. Different models have been proposed to account for new knowing through reflection that have typically been grounded in an information-processing framework. However, there are in-principle arguments that information-processing approaches preclude the emergence of new represen...

The current study investigated parenting influences on children's understanding of lie‐telling in eight different social situations. These social situations clustered into two broad categories that have been assumed in the literature: first, self‐oriented lies that were generally told to benefit the self (e.g., to avoid punishment or gain status);...

Previous research has shown that linguistic cues such as mental and modal verbs can influence young children’s judgments about the reliability of informants. Further, certain languages include grammatical morphemes (i.e. evidential markers), which clarify the source of information coming from testimony (e.g., Bulgarian, Japanese, Turkish). Accordin...

Wellman and Liu’s (2004) ToM scale canonized efforts to generate a developmentally nuanced understanding of ToM. Further elaboration has come from studies showing some variability in task sequencing across two broad categories of culture (i.e., ‘Collectivist’, ‘Individualist’). The current study contributes to our understanding of ToM by exploring...

The literature provides many examples of important developments across different social and cognitive domains at around age 4. Based on an action-based approach to cognition - interactivism - we argue that the changes across different domains can be explained by the development of a domain-general cognitive enabling: reflection. The interactivist m...

This cluster-randomized pre-post comparison study examined the effects of using Sesame Workshop's Little Children, Big Challenges: General Resilience (LCBC) digital media toolkit in preschool classrooms over a 12-week period. Participants included 157 preschool teachers and 766 preschool children from 159 preschool classrooms in 38 Head Start cente...

This study investigated preschool children's learning from exposi-tory and fantastical narrative books and whether the children would show a tendency for learning from expository books in cases of conflicting information. Over three testing sessions, 71 3-and 5-year-olds were individually read one expository book and one fantastical narrative book....

One general perspective on why children over-imitate is that they are learning about the normatively correct way of doing things. If correct, then characteristics of the demonstrator should be relevant. Accordingly, the current study aimed to investigate how the reliability of an adult model influences children's selectivity of what to imitate in a...

Research over several decades has demonstrated that children’s ability to wait and delay immediate gratification in preschool is related to a multitude of developmental outcomes throughout childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. However, less research has focused on concurrent abilities, characteristics, and contexts related to the waiting beha...

It has become increasingly clear over the last half century that there are multiple important changes in children’s abilities taking place at around age 4. These changes span social, emotional, and cognitive domains. While some researchers have argued that a domain-general development explains some of the changes, such a position is a minority view...

The current target article provides a robust investigation of the “cultural charac- ter” of cognitive development. This investigation has both theoretical and empirical/ methodological aspects. Methodologically, the authors argue for a unit of analysis concerning the development of object knowledge that includes other agents engaged in communicat...

While there is general consensus that robust forms of social learning enable the possibility of human cultural evolution, the specific nature, origins, and development of such learning mechanisms remains an open issue. The current paper offers an action-based approach to the study of social learning in general and imitation learning in particular....

Sociocultural changes in Turkey have led to significant reconfigurations in marital and parental dynamics over the last decade (Kağıtçıbaşı & Ataca, 2005). Accordingly, general marital conflict and parental disagreement have become prevalent causes of family dissolution and children’s adjustment problems (Ulu & Fışıloğlu, 2002). The current study e...

Making use of these resources, this framework can borrow from Piaget's [1954] model of object representation because both frameworks share a pragmatist commitment to action as the locus for modeling mental phenomena. For pragmatists, knowledge is a matter of competent interaction with the world and in that sense it is already normative. For Piaget'...

While there is general consensus that robust forms of social learning enable the possibility of human cultural evolution, the specific nature, origins, and development of such learning mechanisms remains an open issue. The current paper offers an action-based approach to the study of social learning in general and imitation learning in particular....

Sesame Workshop is a nonprofit organization involved with community outreach to support the educational needs of children and to foster healthy, strong families. The Educational Outreach Department creates needs-driven public service initiatives across multiple media platforms, leveraging relationships and distributing materials through a network o...

We are in strong agreement with many of the conclusions of Fields’s discussion [this issue], and would like to expand the theoretical context for his arguments in order to offer some further interpretations. Accordingly, in our commentary, we will introduce some historical and developmental considerations in an effort to situate Fields’s position w...

This paper is our response to commentaries from Marshall Haith, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Paul van Geert, Charlie Lewis, David Moore, and Melissa Clearfield on our target article: Stepping off the pendulum: Why only an action-based approach can transcend the nativist-empiricist debate.

This paper is a target article with commentary and response. We argue that the nativist–empiricist debate in developmental psychology is distorted, both theoretically and methodologically, by a shared framework of assumptions concerning the nature of representation. In particular, both sides of the debate assume models of representation that make...

Abstract— Passive versus active ontologies for modeling the nature of representation impose powerful constraints on the conceptual possibilities for the different versions of constructivism. The neoconstructivism outlined by N. S. Newcombe (2011) is convergent with an active, action-based approach to representation; however, it does not directly ad...

Witherington (2011, DOI: 10.1159/000326814) argues that the anti-structuralist stance of certain Dynamical Systems (DS) approaches undermines the essential role of emergence for understanding mental phenomena. If structure is intended to include representation, then we agree. We offer a model of representation that is ultimately grounded in the eme...

The thesis of our commentary is that the framework used to address what are taken by Carey to be the open issues is highly problematic. The presumed necessity of an innate stock of representational primitives fails to account for the emergence of representation out of a nonrepresentational base. This failure manifests itself in problematic ways thr...