01:185:253 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Susan Carey, Language Acquisition Device, Rhesus Macaque
19 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
We now know that very young infants have knowledge of, basic physical properties of the world, elementary math, facts about the social world, and so do many non-human primates. Double dissociations - you can have some kind of brain abnormalities and knock out your lad- but can still walk and eat, or people whose lad is normal but can"t walk due to trauma. The same is true of the mentally represented grammar that the child acquires an attractive partner: special purpose mind/brain mechanisms like this are often called mental modules of our biology. It can"t be used to process visual information, or find your way home, or decide who is. This is sometimes called the massive modularity hypothesis . Darwinian modules (adaptation designed by natural selection: the hundreds (or thousands) of modules (or special purpose systems) in the mind/brain are adaptations.
