John Vervaeke - Dynamical Developmental Psychology: Its power, promise, and peril HD

This talk was presented at the University of Toronto Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Mind - Work in Progress: The Cognitive Science of Development on February 6th, 2016. For more details, see the conference website: http://utism.cogsci.ca/ Abstract: As Developmental Psychology adopts dynamical systems theory as its dominant framework the role of Developmental Psychology within Psychology, and Cognitive Science as a whole, is fundamentally changing. Under the previous computational framework, development was largely seen as providing the historical back-story to the functional computational/information processing mechanisms seen as the heart of cognition. However, dynamical systems have provided a way to talk rigorously about self-organization. When self-organization becomes a central construct then the distinction between history and function breaks down, and development becomes central to the very nature of cognition. Cognition not only develops; it is inherently developmental. Work by Anderson on the massive redeployment hypothesis will be examined as an example of this. Furthermore, the notion of self-organizing promises to explain the issue of emergence that Lewis (2000) argues is a central notion in development that needs explanation. However, self-organization and emergence bring with them challenges to our traditional norms of scientific explanation (Walsh, at this conference), and difficulties integrating normal statistical methods with power-law and scale invariant processes. Not only may the distinction between history and function disappear, but difficulties with boundaries of cognition, and levels of analysis may also come to the fore.