CAS PS 241 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Swiss Army Knife, Tabula Rasa, Face Perception
14 Dec 2017
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Document Summary
This emphasizes the sophistication of infants" and young children"s thinking in areas that have been important throughout human evolutionary history. Like piagetian and information-processing theories, core knowledge theories depict children as active learners. However, core knowledge theories view children as entering the world with specialized learning abilities that allow them to quickly and effortlessly acquire information of evolutionary importance, such as face perception and language. We therefore have some sort of innate knowledge of the world. The mind is like a swiss army knife: it has different domains of knowledge but there is no tabula rasa. These are assumed to be domain speci c, or limited to a particular topic or domain of content. That is, there are separate ways of reasoning about different knowledge domains; and we see evidence of the mind"s specialized organization from very early on. From video: we are a profound cooperative species since mutual cooperation is fundamental for surviving.
