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Dr. Munakata’s 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:
Brace, J. J., Morton, J. B., & Munakata, Y. (in press).
When actions speak louder than words: Improving children's
flexibility in a card-sorting task. Psychological Science.
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.
Munakata, Y., Casey, B. J., and Diamond, A. (2004). Developmental
cognitive neuroscience: progress and potential. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, 8, 122-128.
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