Cognitive development is one of the most difficult issues to understand in psychology. Any theory of cognitive development must include three components. First, it must characterize the initial representational repertoire. Second, it must describe how the initial state differs from the mature conceptual system. Third, it must characterize the learning mechanisms that underlie the transformation from the initial to the mature state. Theoretical proposals on cognitive development can be (simplistically) classified in a theory space along two dimensions: (1) the nature of early representations and (2) how much conceptual change takes place in development. The classical Piagetian position is that infants have no representational system at birth and that a Copernican-type revolution occurs in the way children understand the world (Muller et al. Reference Müller, Carpendale and Smith2009). At the extreme opposite, nativist theories hold that there are innate representations and no qualitative conceptual change, simply enrichment. Over the past two decades, a number of theorists have proposed theories of conceptual development that fall along this continuum (Bloom Reference Bloom2004; Elman et al. Reference Elman, Bates, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, Parisi and Plunkette1996; Gopnik & Meltzoff Reference Gopnik and Meltzoff1997; Mandler Reference Mandler2004; Siegler Reference Siegler1996; Shultz Reference Shultz2003). Carey has written an important book that advocates a rich initial representational state (core cognition) with a qualitative restructuration of concepts as a function of interaction with the world. I will concentrate on the success of The Origins of Concepts (Carey Reference Carey2009; henceforth TOOC) with regard to the concept of agency.
With respect to the initial state, everyone agrees with Fodor that solipsism and blank-slate empiricism are too impoverished to characterize the human starting state. However, (almost) everyone disagrees with Fodor (Reference Fodor1983) that this does not mean that adult commonsense psychology is implanted in the mind at birth or matures independent of experience. TOOC's account has as its centerpiece the notion that the initial stock of human mental representations is not limited to sensory, perceptual, or sensorimotor primitives. Instead, there are innate conceptual representations (or core cognition) that are created by innate perceptual input analyzers. With regard to the concept of agency, Carey proposes that evolution provided humans with core cognition of representations of goals, information, and attentional states. Support for this proposal comes from research that shows that infants attribute goals to geometric figures and human hands and display sophisticated joint attention skills by the end of their first year. These precocious representations of agents are derived from two innate input analyzers, a face recognizer and an action analyzer. Carey believes that both types of analyzers are equally involved in agency core cognition. I agree but would argue that the weight of these cues is likely to change over time. For example, 5-month-olds demonstrate an overattribution of goals to a self-propelled box (Luo & Baillargeon Reference Luo and Baillargeon2007), whereas a recent study in my laboratory revealed that by 18 months, infants do not attribute reference to a contingent humanoid robot (O'Connell et al. Reference O'Connell, Poulin-Dubois, Demke and Guay2009). Furthermore, there is well-established evidence for sophisticated face-processing skills in newborns whereas similar evidence has not been reported for animate-type motion (e.g., contingency) until many months later. More important, there is a dearth of data on infants' association between animate and inanimate motion and object kinds. When do infants know that dogs and people are self-propelled but chairs and spoons are not? It is somewhat troublesome that Carey believes that her hypothesis that representations in this domain are the output of innate input analyzers is not undermined by the late emergence of these analyzers. She argues that performance factors, such as limited executive functions or late maturation, could interfere with the expression of competence as some have argued recently about an implicit form of false belief in infancy (e.g., inhibitory control). Finally, Carey argues that the late emergence of core cognition systems is explained by learning to analyze patterns of contingency and what agents look like. One might object that this makes the innate input analyzer hypothesis nonfalsifiable.
One of the key components of any theory of conceptual change is to explain changes. Carey posits that Quinian bootstrapping is the mechanism by which core cognition blossoms into intuitive theories. By preschool age, and sometimes before, children have developed theory-embedded conceptual knowledge. These intuitive theories emerge through bootstrapping processes such as those described in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. This corresponds closely to the foundations of Piaget's genetic (or developmental) epistemology. Unfortunately, these explanatory mechanisms boil down to garden-variety learning processes: association, mechanisms that support language learning, among others. Also, although Carey devotes a chapter to the transition from core cognition of number to mathematical representations, how Quinian bootstrapping works in the case of agency or object categories remain to be fleshed out.
In conclusion, I found the toolkit designed by Carey to provide almost all the necessary instructions to build a thinking baby. However, the baby described by Carey is a solitary one, constructing intuitive theories about number and objects in some sort of social vacuum. Indeed, there is little or no space devoted to the role of scaffolding and to cultural learning in early conceptual development.
In TOOC, Carey has proposed a theory that has the potential for transforming our understanding of conceptual development. The book also offers a comprehensive review of experimental findings from hers and others' laboratories. This provocative book provides important reading for investigators of early cognitive development as well as for cognitive scientists more generally interested in concepts and the role they play in related mental activities, such as the representation of objects and events, language, and consciousness.
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Cognitive development is one of the most difficult issues to understand in psychology. Any theory of cognitive development must include three components. First, it must characterize the initial representational repertoire. Second, it must describe how the initial state differs from the mature conceptual system. Third, it must characterize the learning mechanisms that underlie the transformation from the initial to the mature state. Theoretical proposals on cognitive development can be (simplistically) classified in a theory space along two dimensions: (1) the nature of early representations and (2) how much conceptual change takes place in development. The classical Piagetian position is that infants have no representational system at birth and that a Copernican-type revolution occurs in the way children understand the world (Muller et al. Reference Müller, Carpendale and Smith2009). At the extreme opposite, nativist theories hold that there are innate representations and no qualitative conceptual change, simply enrichment. Over the past two decades, a number of theorists have proposed theories of conceptual development that fall along this continuum (Bloom Reference Bloom2004; Elman et al. Reference Elman, Bates, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, Parisi and Plunkette1996; Gopnik & Meltzoff Reference Gopnik and Meltzoff1997; Mandler Reference Mandler2004; Siegler Reference Siegler1996; Shultz Reference Shultz2003). Carey has written an important book that advocates a rich initial representational state (core cognition) with a qualitative restructuration of concepts as a function of interaction with the world. I will concentrate on the success of The Origins of Concepts (Carey Reference Carey2009; henceforth TOOC) with regard to the concept of agency.
With respect to the initial state, everyone agrees with Fodor that solipsism and blank-slate empiricism are too impoverished to characterize the human starting state. However, (almost) everyone disagrees with Fodor (Reference Fodor1983) that this does not mean that adult commonsense psychology is implanted in the mind at birth or matures independent of experience. TOOC's account has as its centerpiece the notion that the initial stock of human mental representations is not limited to sensory, perceptual, or sensorimotor primitives. Instead, there are innate conceptual representations (or core cognition) that are created by innate perceptual input analyzers. With regard to the concept of agency, Carey proposes that evolution provided humans with core cognition of representations of goals, information, and attentional states. Support for this proposal comes from research that shows that infants attribute goals to geometric figures and human hands and display sophisticated joint attention skills by the end of their first year. These precocious representations of agents are derived from two innate input analyzers, a face recognizer and an action analyzer. Carey believes that both types of analyzers are equally involved in agency core cognition. I agree but would argue that the weight of these cues is likely to change over time. For example, 5-month-olds demonstrate an overattribution of goals to a self-propelled box (Luo & Baillargeon Reference Luo and Baillargeon2007), whereas a recent study in my laboratory revealed that by 18 months, infants do not attribute reference to a contingent humanoid robot (O'Connell et al. Reference O'Connell, Poulin-Dubois, Demke and Guay2009). Furthermore, there is well-established evidence for sophisticated face-processing skills in newborns whereas similar evidence has not been reported for animate-type motion (e.g., contingency) until many months later. More important, there is a dearth of data on infants' association between animate and inanimate motion and object kinds. When do infants know that dogs and people are self-propelled but chairs and spoons are not? It is somewhat troublesome that Carey believes that her hypothesis that representations in this domain are the output of innate input analyzers is not undermined by the late emergence of these analyzers. She argues that performance factors, such as limited executive functions or late maturation, could interfere with the expression of competence as some have argued recently about an implicit form of false belief in infancy (e.g., inhibitory control). Finally, Carey argues that the late emergence of core cognition systems is explained by learning to analyze patterns of contingency and what agents look like. One might object that this makes the innate input analyzer hypothesis nonfalsifiable.
One of the key components of any theory of conceptual change is to explain changes. Carey posits that Quinian bootstrapping is the mechanism by which core cognition blossoms into intuitive theories. By preschool age, and sometimes before, children have developed theory-embedded conceptual knowledge. These intuitive theories emerge through bootstrapping processes such as those described in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. This corresponds closely to the foundations of Piaget's genetic (or developmental) epistemology. Unfortunately, these explanatory mechanisms boil down to garden-variety learning processes: association, mechanisms that support language learning, among others. Also, although Carey devotes a chapter to the transition from core cognition of number to mathematical representations, how Quinian bootstrapping works in the case of agency or object categories remain to be fleshed out.
In conclusion, I found the toolkit designed by Carey to provide almost all the necessary instructions to build a thinking baby. However, the baby described by Carey is a solitary one, constructing intuitive theories about number and objects in some sort of social vacuum. Indeed, there is little or no space devoted to the role of scaffolding and to cultural learning in early conceptual development.
In TOOC, Carey has proposed a theory that has the potential for transforming our understanding of conceptual development. The book also offers a comprehensive review of experimental findings from hers and others' laboratories. This provocative book provides important reading for investigators of early cognitive development as well as for cognitive scientists more generally interested in concepts and the role they play in related mental activities, such as the representation of objects and events, language, and consciousness.