What Infants Know: New Cognitive Science of Early Development

by JacquesMehler (Author), EmmanuelDupoux (Author)

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  Paperback
  1994

  $3.29

  Are human beings all different? Are we only the products of our personal histories and the influences of cultural and social forces? In the last 25 years, experimental psychologists and other cognitive scientists have led us to revise long-dominant relativist, behaviourist conceptions of human nature. Beyond the individual variation that is so apparent in our everyday interactions there is a body of mental abilities common to every human being, shared in the same fashion that we all share a prototypical arrangement of limbs and internal organs. Human perceptual and cognitive capacities around the planet are strikingly similar. This similarity cannot derive from learning, since different cultures and societies afford such different learning experiences. Rather, it has to do with the fact that these capacities constitute part of our genetic endowment as a species. The competence of newborns to cope with complex situations shows that they do not come to the world as blank slates. Infants spontaneously see the environment as compromising discrete three-dimensional objects. Among these objects, they discriminate things - in particular, other humans - whose faces they instinctively seek out. Infants also expect other humans to communicate with a language that has specific phonological and syntactic properties. They are, in a sense, born to learn, but what they all pay attention to when they learn is both very abstract and very specific in a way that makes them uniquely human. The questions of the extent to which, and how, we are pre-wired , lies at the heart of contemporary debates in cognitive science. The authors' analysis of what it is to be born knowing sheds new light on these debates and points the way to a new scientific psychology of human development.