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Dr. Munakata is a Professor in Psychology and a member of
the Institute of Cognitive Sciences. Her research investigates
the processing mechanisms underlying cognitive development,
using converging evidence from behavior, computational modeling,
and cognitive neuroscience. Her lab focuses on understanding
the prevalence of task-dependent behaviors during the first
years of life. Why do infants and children so often succeed
on one measure of knowledge, while simultaneously failing
other tasks that are meant to measure the same knowledge?
For example, infants seem to know quite a bit about hidden
objects in the first few months of life when tested 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. Similarly, children (and
adults with damage to the prefrontal cortex) often perseverate,
repeating previous behaviors when they no longer make sense
-- despite being able to say what they should be doing instead!
And, toddlers (and rats) appear to reorient after becoming
disoriented using geometric information about the shape of
a room, but not featural information such as the color of
the walls, even though they can use featural information for
other purposes. Dr. Munakata’s research explores each
of these task-dependent behaviors. She focuses on the potential
role of two factors motivated by psychological, neural, and
computational considerations: the gradedness of representations,
and distinct types of representations. She uses multiple methodologies
in this work, including 1) testing infants, children, and
adults on marker tasks adapted from behavioral and single-cell
recording studies with non-human primates, and 2) developing
neural network models of relevant brain areas and conducting
lesion and recording experiments on the models. Her 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 evidence knowledge.
Selected Publications:
Cepeda, N. J. & Munakata, Y. (2007). Why do children
perseverate when they seem to know better: Graded working
memory, or directed inhibition?Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review, 14: 1058-1065.
Brace, J. J., Morton, J. B., & Munakata, Y. (2006). When
actions speak louder than words: Improving children's flexibility
in a card-sorting task.Psychological Science, 17: 665-669.
Shinskey, J.L. & Munakata, Y. (2005). Familiarity breeds
searching: Infants reverse their novelty preferences when
reaching for hidden objects. Psychological Science, 16: 596-600.
Stedron, J. M., Sahni, S. D., and Munakata, Y. (2005). Common
mechanisms for working memory and attention: The case of perseveration
with visible solutions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,
17, 623-631.
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