Origins of knowledge: learning and communication in infancy

Abstract

Where does children's knowledge of the world come from? How do they learn to communicate with others? The general outline of this paper is to integrate recent views of early perceptual–cognitive growth with accounts on development of communication in infancy. The emphasis will be on presenting supporting evidence for a view which combines innate perceptual and constructive mechanisms with associative memory in explaining how human infants process information. To provide a more comprehensive understanding of the origins of the human mind, it will then be examined how the socio-cultural environment, especially through social interaction, mediates developmental transition even during the period of pre-verbal communication. It is concluded that present-day studies of individual differences should provide evidence of how social–cognitive development evolves as a function of innate processing in the human brain, the gradual rise of a hierarchical memory structure, and experience with the socio-cultural world.