Conjugate reinforcement of infant exploratory behavior

Rovee, Carolyn Kent; Rovee, David T.

doi:10.1016/0022-0965(69)90025-3

Cited by 409 publications

(332 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…A kick was de®ned as``any horizontal or vertical movement of the leg that at least partially retraces its original path in a smooth, continuous motion'' (Rovee & Rovee, 1969). A second observer, naive to the infants' group assignment, independently recorded the kicks per min of 13 randomly selected infants and 18 sessions throughout the experiment from the videotapes.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimum duration of reactivation at 3 months of age

Joh¹,

Sweeney²,

Rovee‐Collier³

2001

Developmental Psychobiology

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Brie¯y exposing subjects to an isolated component of an event after they have forgotten can reactivate their memory of it, leading to renewed retention on an ensuing test. In two experiments with forty-eight 3-month-old infants, we asked what minimum duration of a reactivation treatment could recover their forgotten memory of an operant mobile task and whether the minimum duration was affected by how long the memory was forgotten. In Experiment 1, the minimum duration for reactivating the memory 1 week after forgetting was 120 sÐsubstantially longer than the minimum duration required for reactivation at 6 months after the same relative delay. In Experiment 2, the minimum effective duration for reactivation increased linearly with the time since forgetting, from 7.5 s after 1 day to 180 s after 3 weeks. This study reveals that the duration of an effective memory prime is directly related to age and to memory accessibility. ß

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimum duration of reactivation at 3 months of age

Joh¹,

Sweeney²,

Rovee‐Collier³

2001

Developmental Psychobiology

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“…A kick was defined as a vertical or horizontal movement of the foot that retraced its original path in a smooth, continuous motion (Rovee and Rovee, 1969). We used two approaches to measuring learning and memory.…”

Section: Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cortisol, contingency learning, and memory in preterm and full-term infants

Haley

Weinberg

Grunau

2006

Psychoneuroendocrinology

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SummaryCortisol plays an important role in learning and memory. An inverted-U shaped function has been proposed to account for the positive and negative effects of cortisol on cognitive performance and memory in adults, such that too little or too much impair but moderate amounts facilitate performance. Whether such relationships between cortisol and mental function apply to early infancy, when cortisol secretion, learning, and memory undergo rapid developmental changes, is unknown. We compared relationships between learning/memory and cortisol in preterm and full-term infants and examined whether a greater risk for adrenal insufficiency associated with prematurity produces differential cortisol-memory relationships. Learning in three-month old (corrected for gestational age) preterm and full-term infants was evaluated using a conjugate reinforcement mobile task. Memory was tested by repeating the same task 24 h later. Salivary cortisol samples were collected before and 20 min after the presentation of the mobile. We found that preterm infants had lower cortisol levels and smaller cortisol responses than full-term infants. This is consistent with relative adrenal insufficiency reported in the neonatal period. Infants who showed increased cortisol levels from 0 to 20 min on Day 1 had significantly better memory, regardless of prematurity, than infants who showed decreased cortisol levels.

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“…The prime mover in the so-called MCR paradigm was the late Carolyn Rovee and her colleagues ( [75][76][77] see also [49] for review). Just as Piaget had done 30 years earlier (though strangely his observations are not mentioned), Rovee and Rovee [75] tied a ribbon to the ankles of 3-to-4 month old babies and attached it to a mobile hanging over the baby's crib.…”

Section: Experiments Crucis…or Is It?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Just as Piaget had done 30 years earlier (though strangely his observations are not mentioned), Rovee and Rovee [75] tied a ribbon to the ankles of 3-to-4 month old babies and attached it to a mobile hanging over the baby's crib. Conjugate reinforcement refers to the fact that any foot or leg movements caused the mobile to move, creating sights and sounds and feelings that babies seem to enjoy.…”

Section: Experiments Crucis…or Is It?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather it is to suggest -as a result of the mapping between data and model--that the transition from an uncoupled state to a persistent coupled state, from spontaneous movement to deliberate action, is the root of agency. A spontaneous kick moves the mobile and moving the mobile leads to more forceful kicks, in Carolyn Rovee's words "effectively more intense responding produced a more intense reward" ( [75] p.35). Outside this response-for-reward framework, the main point is that when the value of a single parameter a reaches a critical point, it gives rise to the 'eureka effect', a sense of causal agency, "this is me making things happen in the world not some outside force making that attractive mobile oscillate."…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Self-Organizing Origins of Agency

Kelso¹

2016

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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The question of agency and directedness in living systems has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. What principles and mechanisms underlie the emergence of agency? Analysis and dynamical modeling of experiments on human infants suggest that the birth of agency is due to a eureka-like, pattern forming phase transition in which the infant suddenly realizes it can make things happen in the world. The main mechanism involves positive feedback: when the baby's initially spontaneous movements cause the world to change, their perceived consequences have a sudden and sustained amplifying effect on the baby's further actions. The baby discovers itself as a causal agent. Some implications of this theory are discussed. KeywordsCoordination Dynamics; collective variables; phase transition; positive feedback; emergence; agent; consciousness; synchrony; metastability What is this 'I'?We humans tend to believe that we are agents, masters and mistresses of our fate, that our deeds and desires are our destiny. Yet despite a sizeable literature on 'the sense of agency' and its behavioral and neuroimaging correlates (see [1,2] for recent reviews) the scientific basis of causal agency and how we come to experience ourselves as agents is lacking. Agency means action towards an end. When it comes to the behavior of living things, our inability to understand end-directedness forces us to posit (often implicitly) an intelligent agent residing somewhere inside the system that is responsible for the end-directed behavior we observe. The self as casual agent remains a ghost in the machine awaiting exorcism, perhaps, by new insights from the brain and cognitive sciences.Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species touched only briefly on the topic of agency though he noted how 'admirably adapted' was the woodpecker to catch insects under the Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Franklin Fearing [5] noted that "Even before man speculated about the nature and source of his own experiences, he was probably curious about the agencies by which animal motion was effected" (p.1). Life and motion, Fearing remarks, are almost synonymous terms. HHS Public AccessIn his famous book, "What is life?" Erwin Schrödinger [6] one of the chief architects of quantum mechanics and the author of the famous equation that bears his name, proposed an "order from order" principle as the physical basis of life. Schrödinger speculated that this new kind of order took the form of an aperiodic crystal, later exposed as the beautiful double helical structure of the DNA molecule [7]. Not much mor...

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Conjugate reinforcement of infant exploratory behavior

Cited by 409 publications

References 6 publications

Minimum duration of reactivation at 3 months of age

Minimum duration of reactivation at 3 months of age

Cortisol, contingency learning, and memory in preterm and full-term infants

On the Self-Organizing Origins of Agency

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