The concept of development and the development of concepts. Education and development in Vygotsky’s thinking

Have You Ever Seen a Robot? An Analysis of Children's Drawings Between Technology and Science Fiction

Technologies have become an essential part of the daily life of our children. Consequently, artifacts that imply the early adoption of abstract thinking affect the imagination of children and young people in relation to the world of technology, now much more than they did in the past. With the emerging importance of robots in many aspects of our everyday lives, the goal of this study is to investigate which mental representations children have about robots. To this end, drawings from 104 children aged between 7 and 12 years old were used as a map of representations, considering the drawings as a proxy capable of evoking learned or emerging mental frameworks. The drawings were analyzed in several steps: they were first labeled using binary descriptors and then classified using clustering methods based on Hamming distances between drawings. Finally, questionnaire items covering children's perceptions about robots were analyzed for each of the resulting cluster separately to identify differences between them. The results show that there are relationships between the way children draw robots and their perception about robots' capabilities as well as their aspirations to pursue a career in science. These findings can provide meaningful insights into how to design educational robots and learning activities for children to learn with and about robots.

Concept formation skills in long-term cochlear implant users

This study investigated if a period of auditory sensory deprivation followed by degraded auditory input and related language delays affects visual concept formation skills in long-term prelingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users. We also examined if concept formation skills are mediated or moderated by other neurocognitive domains (i.e., language, working memory, and executive control). Relative to normally hearing (NH) peers, CI users displayed significantly poorer performance in several specific areas of concept formation, especially when multiple comparisons and relational concepts were components of the task. Differences in concept formation between CI users and NH peers were fully explained by differences in language and inhibition-concentration skills. Language skills were also found to be more strongly related to concept formation in CI users than in NH peers. The present findings suggest that complex relational concepts may be adversely affected by a period of early prelingual deafness followed by access to underspecified and degraded sound patterns and spoken language transmitted by a CI. Investigating a unique clinical population such as early-implanted prelingually deaf children with CIs can provide new insights into foundational brain-behavior relations and developmental processes.

A dialogical conception of concepts

Classical psychology and philosophy have conceived of thinking as being intimately related to concepts. According to predominant psychological theories, concepts are the building blocks of propositional thought. Although important authors such as William James and Lev Vygotsky offered alternative accounts of concepts, they have been largely ignored. This is particularly surprising in the case of sociocultural theories, which have not elaborated further on this important aspect of psychological life. This article seeks to explore these alternative theorizations on concepts in order to contribute to an understanding of concepts as processes that unfold through speech according to social dynamics. We also discuss some aspects of the theory of discourse of Bakhtin and Vološinov, in order to study the implications of a dialogical theory for the conception of concepts. We propose to conceive concepts as generic generalization processes that unfold through discourse in response to others’ generalizations.