Summary of Discussion of Psychobiological Development

Prepared by Spencer Payne and David Jakhelln

(additions and comments by Frawley)

Spelke, Elizabeth Initial Knowledge: Six Suggestions," Cognition 50(1994),431-45.

Elizabeth Spelke has made six suggestions for initial knowledge in children

These are:

1. Knowledge emerges early in development.
2. Initial knowledge is domain-specific
3. Initial knowledge encompasses fundamental constraints on the entities in a domain
4. Initial knowledge is innate
5. Initial knowledge constitutes the core of mature knowledge
6. Initial knowlege is task-specific

In class we discussed the different domains of initial knowledge. We came to the conclusion that children have initial knowledge of:

• Basic Physics - cohesion, continuity, and contact. These principles do not always hold true in reality. Children do not have initial knowledge of the world as it is, so to speak
• Geometry - Euclidean geometry is "good enough." Shape takes precedence over color and texture. Children will use shape instead of color/texture to orient themselves in a room because shape is permanant while color and texture are not.

NOTE: this must mean that salience is not the way initial knowledge operates since color and texture would be more salient than shape; reliability is more important than ubiquity

• Number - there is initial knowledge of sets, sequence, one to one correspondence, and basic addition/subtraction (perhaps better defined as awareness of increases and decreases)
• Psychology - humans affect each other at a distance. Humans are entities with insides: that is, they are different from other physical objects in the child's world.

Other possible domains: music (knowledge of tones, perfect fifths and resolution), faces

Note: these domains are themselves schematic: that is, they specify the minimal knowledge needed to be a human mind/brain.

All of the above are separate specific encapsulated domains

NOTE: encapsulation is an important point. Physical knowledge and person knowledge, e.g., do not get in each other's way; spatial knowledge does not bootstrap up the content of rudimentary sets, etc.

Questions: Even if this information is operative early in development (3 months), is it innate? What is NOT part of initial human knowledge?

Question: How is human initial knowledge like or different from animal knowledge? Or better, what are the ways that evolution allows minimal mind to converge and diverge across species?

Reading:

Gallistel, et al. "Lessons from Animal Learning for the Study of Cognitive Development"

This paper helps to enhance the views expressed by Spelke in that the attention is turned to the rest of the animal kingdom in order to gain some sort of representation of how the mind brain functions.
      It is put forward that animal learning, in more than just the acquisition of factual knowledge, is aided by domain specific "innate" knowledge or privilege. This can be seen for two major reasons presented by the article:

• If the mind brain were not domain specific, equipotentiality would allow the pairing of different stimuli with responses. This is not the case, as exemplified by:
• The impossibility of training a pigeon to flap its wings for food or peck when in danger
• Slow or nonexistent learning of hamsters to rear or wash their faces for food
• The pairing of taste with poisoned water and not flashing lights

Note: these experimental results show that certain behaviors are tied to certain other behaviors and stimuli: flapping for flight rather than food, e.g. So not all associations are equipotential.

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• There are also non-associative learning examples which show presence of a learning mechanism resulting in a maturation based on some innate, or predetermined manner by which to learn or acquire knowledge:
• Critical periods in barn owl development in which hindrance of auditory or visual stimuli results in reduced or no ability to localize objects
• Similar periods in development of buntings in localization and migration habits based on stellar positions
• Optimization of foraging habits by fish and ducks which are able to proportionately forage at locations of varying abundancies
• Infant vervet monkeys' knowledge of basic "screams" of danger for leopards, snakes, and eagles, overgeneralized until maturation and knowledge hone them

NOTE: human critical periods for knowledge development, like language.

As such the greatest cases for domain-specific learning arise from the experiments in associative/privileged learning. However, the non-associative learnings provide evidence for this as well in that they show a specificity of learning based on some sort of innate knowledge. As animals, our learning, though varied by its focus, is ultimately controlled by the constraints of the mind-brain -- something we cannot change. This seems to provide for further evidence for a "hard-wiring" of the brain also seen in the language acquisition of humans.

Question: so what is it like to be a bat (as Thomas Nagle asks)?