Innate Representations Research Articles

Number nativism1

AbstractNumber Nativism is the view that humans innately represent precise natural numbers. Despite a long and venerable history, it is often considered hopelessly out of touch with the empirical record. I argue that this is a mistake. After clarifying Number Nativism and distancing it from related conjectures, I distinguish three arguments which have been seen to refute the view. I argue that, while popular, two of these arguments miss the mark, and fail to place pressure on Number Nativism. Meanwhile, a third argument is best construed as a challenge: rather than refuting Number Nativism, it challenges its proponents to provide positive evidence for their thesis and show that this can be squared with apparent counterevidence. In response, I introduce psycholinguistic work on The Tolerance Principle (not yet considered in this context), propose that it is hard to make sense of without positing precise and innate representations of natural numbers, and argue that there is no obvious reason why these innate representations couldn't serve as a basis for mature numeric conception.

Innate Mind Need Not Be Within

It is a widely accepted thesis in the cognitive sciences and in naturalistic philosophy of mind that the contents of at least some mental representations are innate. A question that has popped up in discussions concerning innate mental representations is this. Are externalist theories of mental content applicable to the content of innate representations? Views on the matter vary and sometimes conflict. To date, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the relationship between content externalism and content innateness. The aim of this paper is to provide such an assessment. I focus on the notions of innateness that are employed in innateness hypotheses within the cognitive sciences and adjacent fields of philosophy, and on causal externalist theories of content. I distinguish between three accounts of what being innate might amount to in innateness hypotheses within the cognitive sciences, and between three types of causal externalism. I explain what the possibility of innate externalistically individuated representations depends upon given all nine combinations. I explain why causal externalism can be true of innate mental representations, given but one of these combinations.

The Small Number System

I argue that the human mind includes an innate domain-specific system for representing precise small numerical quantities. This theory contrasts with object-tracking theories and with domain-general theories that only make use of mental models. I argue that there is a good amount of evidence for innate representations of small numerical quantities and that such a domain-specific system has explanatory advantages when infants’ poor working memory is taken into account. I also show that the mental models approach requires previously unnoticed domain-specific structure and consequently that there is no domain-general alternative to an innate domain-specific small number system.

How Nature Meets Nurture: Universal Grammar and Statistical Learning

Evidence of children’s sensitivity to statistical features of their input in language acquisition is often used to argue against learning mechanisms driven by innate knowledge. At the same time, evidence of children acquiring knowledge that is richer than the input supports arguments in favor of such mechanisms. This tension can be resolved by separating the inferential and deductive components of the language learning mechanism. Universal Grammar provides representations that support deductions about sentences that fall outside of experience. In addition, these representations define the evidence that learners use to infer a particular grammar. The input is compared with the expected evidence to drive statistical inference. In support of this model, we review evidence of (a) children’s sensitivity to the environment, (b) mismatches between input and intake, (c) the need for learning mechanisms beyond innate representations, and (d) the deductive consequences of children’s acquired syntactic representations.

The linking problem is a special case of a general problem none of us has solved: Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven

In this commentary, we focus on the linking problem Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven identify. Instead of taking a stance on the issue of universal grammar itself, we adopt an epistemological and methodological perspective on language acquisition research. We argue that the problem, linking the input to preexisting representations, constitutes just a small part of a larger methodological problem, namely how to link the input a learner receives, through a set of learning mechanisms and possibly innate representations, to the behavior the learner is producing, whether in spontaneous production or in laboratory experiments. Currently, none of the existing proposals provide an evaluated, or even a testable, account of the full process, that is, an input-output model of linguistic ontogeny. Although the focus on phenomena in isolation, probably an effect of the prevalence of the experimental method, allows the researcher some degree of control, it also distracts from the understanding of how the different mechanisms behave and interact. Our proposed solution is a more holistic approach to the problem in which the learning mechanisms and their interaction are made fully explicit , and in which the predicted behavior of the learner is (more) globally evaluated. Computational modeling provides exactly the tools appropriate for this task, thereby furthering more precise and testable theories of the learning mechanisms involved.*

Unearthing Origins: The Use of Art, Archaeology, and Exhibitions in Creating Korean National Identity, 1945–1962

The 1957 exhibition, Masterpieces of Korean Art, suggests that the promotion of Korean cultural artifacts as innate and inherent representations of Korean national pride is a relatively recent phenomenon with a traceable history. Curated by Alan Priest and Robert Paine, the show made its debut in Washington, DC, and toured the United States and Europe over a five-year period. Crafted with a Western audience in mind, Masterpieces nevertheless served many interrelated and competing constituencies. As the first large-scale exhibition of Korean artifacts sent abroad, the show became the battleground for the assertion of a specifically South Korean identity separate from its then recent history as a Japanese colony during the early part of the twentieth century.

How to build a baby: A new toolkit?

AbstractCarey proposes a theory of conceptual development that specifies innate conceptual representations that get learning started. Those representations are the output of innate domain-specific input analyzers. I contend that innate core cognition about agency is itself a gradual construction and that the role of Quinian bootstrapping needs elaboration to account for the development of intuitive theories of psychology.

Morphosyntactic learning: A neurobehavioral perspective.

Introduction In his last book, Ernst Moerk laments: How could a field that is between 100 and 200 years old, whose data are so abundantly and so readily at hand, and which has produced impressive evidence for the wealth of input and its effects, be at present still in a state where almost everything is controversial and where misleading conclusions are so predominant? While year in and year out about two billion young people acquire the various levels of widely differing, and therefore learned, mother tongues, learnability of language has been seriously questioned and rejected in some quarters. (2000, p.179) It can be argued that the major reason for this situation is that the linguistic grammatical classes are still viewed as psychologically real and necessary for language acquisition. Whereas the formal concepts forged by linguists may be appropriate for describing sentence relationships, it is dubious that they are used by native speakers. A sequential-associative theory of morphosyntactic functioning, rooted in pragmatics and semantics, may be proposed as a plausible alternative. Tongue and Language Theoretical writing in linguistics witnesses a confusion between tongue (the language of a nation, country, etc.) and language (a neuropsychological function). The major caveat arises in keeping with the tradition of generative grammar. Over a period of 50 years, the aim of Chomsky and followers has been to account for a human faculty of language, defined as the ability to produce and understand an infinite number of grammatical sentences. Few people have realized the unrealistic character of such a research agenda. Linguistics is a hermeneutic of the tongues. It lacks the methodological tools to go beyond description. Linguists have no experimental control over the situations in which language behaviors occur and have no objective methods for validating empirically alternative theoretical models. There exists a belief in that field (assumed uncritically in psycholinguistics) that what is descriptively relevant must be ipso facto appropriate for explaining how real people proceed when producing sentences. However, to the extent that language functioning is concerned, one is addressing a neuropsychological question calling for a behavioral methodology. Asking people is enough to convince oneself that native speakers (non-language specialists) ignore grammatical notions. They rely on semantic categories. For example, grammatical subjects are agents or topics of state, verbs specify states, actions or events, clauses express complete ideas, etc. Compare with the geometrical definitions in structural linguistics (for example, the reverse-tree scheme for sentence representation): the grammatical subject is the noun head of the noun phrase, located immediately below the symbol for the sentence and there is only one noun in this position. Such a state of affairs is not alien to the generative linguist. Chomsky (1965) warns: Thus a generative grammar attempts to specify what the speaker actually knows, not what he may report about his knowledge. (p. 8) Assuming for the sake of discussion that the typical native speaker tacitly has at her/his disposal the formal machinery described by generative grammar (disregarding differences between successive versions of the theory), where could such a knowledge come from? Generative linguists and psycholinguists (e.g., Pinker, 1994) insist that syntactic categories cannot be induced from the input given that they are not overtly marked and have no one to single correspondence with the semantic categories. Syntactic categories, it is assumed, must be supplied innately or elaborated under the guidance of innate representations. The trouble is that representational inneism has no empirical foundation. Genes coding for universal grammatical representations have yet to be discovered. It is even doubtful that the genome has sufficient capacity for encoding the huge number of binary decisions that would be necessary to account for a linguistic grammar (Kurzwiel, 2006). …

A comparison of explicit and implicit tasks of numerical processing: The case of non-symbolic stimuli

Event Abstract Back to Event A comparison of explicit and implicit tasks of numerical processing: The case of non-symbolic stimuli Emmy Defever1*, Delphine Sasanguie1 and Bert Reynvoet1 1 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Subfaculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Belgium The processing of quantity is crucial in daily life and is thought to build upon an innate representation of magnitude. The development of number processing has been intensively studied examining the performance on basic number tasks. The results are usually explained by assuming a magnitude representation akin to a mental number line. On this mental number line, magnitudes are represented on a number line with partially overlapping representations for nearby numbers with decreasing overlap (i.e. more exact representations) with increasing age. Neuroimaging studies repeatedly show the involvement of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in magnitude processing and consequently in the performance on these basic number tasks. Despite its popularity, the number line concept fails to account for certain recent empirical findings showing inconsistencies between explicit (e.g. number comparison) and implicit (e.g. priming) number tasks. In this contribution, we want to compare the performance of adults and children on different implicit and explicit measures of quantity representations (e.g. number comparison, same-different judgments, priming test and number line estimation). In a first study with adults, we will conduct the before mentioned tasks and investigate which behavioral measure is related to mathematical ability. In a second study, we will take the same approach in a cross-sectional study with children. Hereby, our goals are threefold: 1) investigating whether the behavioral indicators are reliable 2) compare explicit and implicit behavioral indicators of magnitude processing and 3) examining which measure relates to the performance of children in the classroom and the performance of adults on a math test, as an indicator of their general mathematical ability. In both studies, all tasks will be presented with symbolic as well as with non-symbolic stimuli. This poster will focus on the non-symbolic part. Conference: EARLI SIG22 - Neuroscience and Education, Zurich, Switzerland, 3 Jun - 5 Jun, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Number processing Citation: Defever E, Sasanguie D and Reynvoet B (2010). A comparison of explicit and implicit tasks of numerical processing: The case of non-symbolic stimuli. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: EARLI SIG22 - Neuroscience and Education. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.11.00036 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 31 May 2010; Published Online: 31 May 2010. * Correspondence: Emmy Defever, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Subfaculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Kortrijk, Belgium, emmy.defever@kuleuven-kortrijk.be Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Emmy Defever Delphine Sasanguie Bert Reynvoet Google Emmy Defever Delphine Sasanguie Bert Reynvoet Google Scholar Emmy Defever Delphine Sasanguie Bert Reynvoet PubMed Emmy Defever Delphine Sasanguie Bert Reynvoet Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

A comparison of implicit and explicit tasks of numerical processing: the case of symbolic stimuli.

Event Abstract Back to Event A comparison of implicit and explicit tasks of numerical processing: the case of symbolic stimuli. Delphine Sasanguie1*, Emmy Defever1 and Bert Reynvoet1 1 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, ISB, Belgium The processing of quantity is crucial in daily life and is thought to build upon an innate representation of magnitude. The development of number processing has been intensively studied examining the performance on basic number tasks. The results are usually explained by assuming a magnitude representation akin to a mental number line. On this mental number line, magnitudes are represented on a number line with partially overlapping representations for nearby numbers with decreasing overlap (i.e. more exact representations) with increasing age. Neuroimaging studies repeatedly show the involvement of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in magnitude processing and consequently in the performance on these basic number tasks. Despite its popularity, the number line concept fails to account for certain recent empirical findings showing inconsistencies between explicit (e.g. number comparison) and implicit (e.g. priming) number tasks. In this contribution, we want to compare the performance of adults and children on different implicit and explicit measures of quantity representations (e.g. number comparison, same-different judgments, priming test and number line estimation). In a first study with adults, we will conduct the before mentioned tasks and investigate which behavioral measure is related to mathematical ability. In a second study, we will take the same approach in a cross-sectional study with children. Hereby, our goals are threefold: 1) investigating whether the behavioral indicators are reliable 2) compare explicit and implicit behavioral indicators of magnitude processing and 3) examining which measure relates to the performance of children in the classroom and the performance of adults on a math test, as an indicator of their general mathematical ability. In both studies, all tasks will be presented with symbolic as well as with non-symbolic stimuli. This poster will focus on the symbolic part. Conference: EARLI SIG22 - Neuroscience and Education, Zurich, Switzerland, 3 Jun - 5 Jun, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Number processing Citation: Sasanguie D, Defever E and Reynvoet B (2010). A comparison of implicit and explicit tasks of numerical processing: the case of symbolic stimuli.. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: EARLI SIG22 - Neuroscience and Education. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.11.00070 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 01 Jun 2010; Published Online: 01 Jun 2010. * Correspondence: Delphine Sasanguie, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, ISB, Kortrijk, Belgium, delphine.sasanguie@hogent.be Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Delphine Sasanguie Emmy Defever Bert Reynvoet Google Delphine Sasanguie Emmy Defever Bert Reynvoet Google Scholar Delphine Sasanguie Emmy Defever Bert Reynvoet PubMed Delphine Sasanguie Emmy Defever Bert Reynvoet Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Where Our Number Concepts Come From

Where Our Number Concepts Come From

Chimpanzee Faces are ‘Special’ to Humans

A longstanding proposal is that primates, including humans, might have an innate representation of face structure. But, if humans have such a representation, how broad is its form: limited to coding conspecifics, or general enough to cover related species? The results reported here show adult humans process faces of chimpanzees in a way previously assumed to be exclusive to human faces. The composite effect was used to provide the first direct test of so-called holistic processing. Despite no lifetime experience of chimpanzees, adult humans showed a substantial composite effect for chimpanzee faces, and also an inversion effect. There was no similar evidence of holistic processing for faces of species of greater phylogenic distance from humans, including gorillas, spider monkeys, sheep, chickens, and Jacky lizards; nor was there any effect for non-face objects. In contrast to the holistic processing results, discrimination of chimpanzee faces was, as expected, poor. In the context of evidence that poor discrimination of heterospecific faces arises from a process of perceptual narrowing in infancy, our results suggest that adults retain some aspects of a broader bandwidth present in neonates (holistic processing) but lose others (discrimination).

Modeling a flexible representation machinery of human concept learning

It is widely acknowledged that categorically organized abstract knowledge plays a significant role in high-order human cognition. Yet, there are many unknown issues about the nature of how categories are internally represented in our mind. Traditionally, it has been considered that there is a single innate internal representation system for categorical knowledge, such as Exemplars, Prototypes, or Rules. However, results of recent empirical and computational studies collectively suggest that the human internal representation system is apparently capable of exhibiting behaviors consistent with various types of internal representation schemes. We, then, hypothesized that humans' representational system as a dynamic mechanism, capable of selecting a representation scheme that meets situational characteristics, including complexities of category structure. The present paper introduces a framework for a cognitive model that integrates robust and flexible internal representation machinery. Three simulation studies were conducted. The results showed that SUPERSET, our new model, successfully exhibited cognitive behaviors that are consistent with three main theories of the human internal representation system. Furthermore, a simulation study on social cognitive behaviors showed that the model was capable of acquiring knowledge with high commonality, even for a category structure with numerous valid conceptualizations.

Understanding the developmental origins of primate face recognition: Theoretical commentary on Martin-Malivel and Okada (2007).

J. Martin-Malivel and K. Okada (2007, this issue) reported that chimpanzees raised with extensive social contact with humans show face discrimination abilities for human faces that exceed those for conspecific faces. Martin-Malivel and Okada have placed this finding in the theoretical context of the relative role of experience and innate face representations. The present article discusses the logic of the various styles of studies relevant to this question--considering primates without prior visual experience, sensitive periods, perceptual narrowing, childhood development, other-species effects, other-race effects, social quality of experience with nonconspecifics, and perceived social group membership--and also reviews the key current data. A case is made that there is still a long way to go in understanding whether there is an innate representation of conspecific faces, how tightly tuned any such representation is to conspecific morphology, and how experience obtained during different age brackets (e.g., infancy versus adulthood) affects discrimination and interacts with any innate representation.

Explaining Universal Color Categories Through a Constrained Acquisition Process

Color categories enjoy a special status among human perceptual categories as they exhibit a remarkable cross-cultural similarity. Many scholars have explained this universal character as being the result of an innate representation or an innate developmental program which all humans share. We will critically assess the available evidence, which is at best controversial, and we will suggest an alternative account for the universality of color categories based on linguistic transmission constrained by universal biases. We introduce a computational model to test our hypothesis and present results. These show that indeed the cultural acquisition of color categories together with mild constraints on the perception and categorical representation result in categories that have a distribution similar to human color categories.

What experience is required for acquiring tool competence? Experiments with two callitrichids

Cottontop tamarins, Saguinus oedipus, do not spontaneously use tools in the wild or in captivity. Yet, adults and naive infants with no experimental experience with tools show impressive sensitivity to their design features in tool choice experiments. Based on these findings, it has been hypothesized that tamarins are equipped with an innate mechanism for recognizing the functional features of tools (Hauser et al. 2002a, b, Animal Behaviour, 64, 299–311). An alternative explanation is that the initial exposure to one tool during training triggered their sensitivity to a suite of functionally relevant features during generalization. Here, we test this hypothesis, bypassing the training phase, and presenting tool-naive tamarins with a variety of tool choices, each pairing involving novel featural changes to the tool's design. We also tested experimentally naive common marmosets, Callithrix jacchus, a closely related species that, like tamarins, do not spontaneously use tools either in the wild or in captivity. Following the first experimental session, there was no evidence that either species selected tools based on their design characteristics. This finding forces a rejection of the hypothesis that tamarins are equipped with an experience-independent, innate representation of tools. Exposure to several more sessions generally failed to alter the tamarins' discrimination, but caused marmosets to preferentially pick the functionally correct tools, attending to relevant featural dimensions (shape, material). Overall, these results suggest that nontool users may have an innate mechanism that operates over object mechanics more generally (i.e. as opposed to tools specifically), and this mechanism is triggered on the basis of a relatively impoverished input.

Are Color Categories Innate or Internalized? Hypotheses and Implications

AbstractThe considerable agreement across languages in the way they categorize the color domain, despite independent historical development, demands an explanation. One option is to postulate a universal innate representation of the color categories, 'hardwired' into each observer's brain. An alternative is that observers internalize their color categories through a process of cultural (linguistic) transmission, constrained by some kind of 'optimality hypothesis' to account for the cross-language agreement. A number of optimality hypotheses are reviewed. It is tempting to believe that the vivid experiential quality of the categories can only be explained if they are determined by innate representations rather than by linguistic imprinting. However, linguistic transmission of color categories – perturbed from their optimal boundaries by special circumstances – fits best with the experience of dichromats. Even for the 'primary hue' categories, where the case for innate representations should be strongest, the evidence is far from convincing.

I don't think so: Pinker on the mentalese monopoly

Stephen Pinker sets out over a dozen arguments in The language instinct (Morrow, New York, 1994) for his widely shared view that natural language is inadequate as a medium for thought. Thus he argues we must suppose that the primary medium of thought and inference is an innate propositional representation system, mentalese. I reply to the various arguments and so defend the view that some thought essentially involves natural language. I argue mentalese doesn't solve any of the problems Pinker cites for the view that we think in natural language. So I don't think I think the way he thinks I think.

Innate representations?

Early Development and ParentingVolume 7, Issue 3 p. 145-146 Research Article Innate representations? Gary F. Marcus, Corresponding Author Gary F. Marcus gary@psych.nyu.edu Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USADepartment of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USASearch for more papers by this author Gary F. Marcus, Corresponding Author Gary F. Marcus gary@psych.nyu.edu Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USADepartment of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 December 1998 https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0917(199809)7:3<145::AID-EDP176>3.0.CO;2-HAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume7, Issue3Special Issue: Mark H. Johnson's Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceSeptember 1998Pages 145-146 RelatedInformation

Innate representations?

Early Development and ParentingVolume 7, Issue 3 p. 145-146 Research Article Innate representations? Gary F. Marcus, Corresponding Author Gary F. Marcus gary@psych.nyu.edu Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USADepartment of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USASearch for more papers by this author Gary F. Marcus, Corresponding Author Gary F. Marcus gary@psych.nyu.edu Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USADepartment of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 December 1998 https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0917(199809)7:3<145::AID-EDP176>3.0.CO;2-HAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume7, Issue3Special Issue: Mark H. Johnson's Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceSeptember 1998Pages 145-146 RelatedInformation