MODELING COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENT ON BALANCE SCALE PHENOMENA

We used cascade-correlation to model human cognitive development on a well studied psychological task, the balance scale. In balance scale e xperiments, the child is asked to predict the outcome of placing certa in numbers of equal weights at various distances to the left or right of a fulcrum, Both stage Progressions and information salience effects have been found with children on this task. Cascade-correlation is a generative connectionist algorithm that constructs its own network top ology as it learns. Cascade-correlation networks provided better fits to these human data than did previous models, whether rule-based or co nnectionist. The network model was used to generate a variety of novel predictions for psychological research.