Yuko Munakata
Adjunct Professor

My research investigates the processing mechanisms underlying cognitive development, using converging evidence from behavior, computational modelling, and cognitive neuroscience. Our lab focuses on understanding the ubiquity of task-dependent behaviors (success in some, but not all, tasks meant to measure the same cognitive construct) from infancy through early childhood, and their implications for the psychological, neural, and computational mechanisms underlying cognitive development.

One main line of research explores these issues in the context of infants' memory for hidden objects, which looks very different depending on how the infants are tested. For example, infants can appear wildly precocious in the first few months of life in visual habituation paradigms, but seem to possess an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality for several months longer when tested in searching for hidden objects. Many researchers have tried to resolve this puzzle by arguing that infants fail such tasks due to deficits in means-ends analysis abilities rather than memory problems. However, we have demonstrated that infants use the identical means-ends skills to retrieve visible objects that they fail to use to retrieve hidden objects, suggesting that their failures to retrieve hidden objects cannot be attributed solely to means-ends deficits. Our research explores the potential role of two other factors motivated by psychological, neural, and computational considerations: the gradedness of representations of hidden objects, and distinct types of representations of hidden objects. We use multiple methodologies in this work, including 1) testing neurologically-intact infants on marker tasks adapted from behavioral and single-cell recording studies with non-human primates, 2) developing neural network models of relevant brain areas and conducting lesion and recording experiments on the models, 3) testing brain-damaged patients (in collaboration with Akira Miyake, Mike Mozer, and Randy O'Reilly at CU Boulder), and 4) testing rhesus macaques (in collaboration with Marc Hauser at Harvard University, and Liz Spelke and Earl Miller at MIT).

Another line of research explores the issues of task-dependent behavior in the context of toddlers' spatial cognition. Toddlers (and rats) appear to reorient after becoming disoriented using geometric information about the shape of the room, but not featural information such as the color of the walls, even though they can use featural information for other purposes. We explore potential mechanisms underlying such non-intuitive behaviors. Again, we build on what is known about the relevant neural mechanisms, and conduct our work using multiple methodologies including behavioral studies with toddlers and neural network simulations.

Our overarching goal is to use children's task-dependent behaviors as a window onto the mechanisms underlying cognitive development, and the nature of the origins of our knowledge.

Representative Publications:

Munakata, Y. and Stedron, J.M. (in press). Neural network models of cognitive development. In C.A. Nelson & M. Luciana (Eds.), Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Munakata, Y., Santos, L.R., Spelke, E.S., Hauser, M.D., & O'Reilly, R.C. (2001). Visual representation in the wild: How rhesus monkeys parse objects. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 13, 44-58.

O'Reilly, R.C., & Munakata, Y. (2000). Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating the Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Munakata, Y. (1998). Infant perseveration and implications for object permanence theories: A PDP Model of the A-not-B task. Developmental Science, 1(2), 161-184.

Munakata, Y., McClelland, J.L., Johnson, M.H., & Siegler. R.S. (1997). Rethinking infant knowledge: Toward an adaptive process account of successes and failures in object permanence tasks. Psychological Review, 104(4), 686-713.

Yuko Munakata
Ph.D. 1996,
Carnegie Mellon University

Adjunct Professor
Phone: 303.735.5499
Fax: 303.492.2967
email:
munakata@psych.colorado.edu
website