Core Knowledge Theories

Core Knowledge Theories

1. Core Knowledge Theory

   • focus on understanding other people's goals and intentions
   • consider evolutionary history
     • young children reason in ways that are considerably more advanced than Piaget suggested.
     • some areas have probable importance in human evolution
   • learning
     • living v non-living things
     • identifying human faces
     • finding one's way around their environment
     • language learning
   • children are active learners
   • children have innate capabilities
     • research on infant face perception
       • suggests that we have specialised learning mechanisms for acquiring information important to survival
     • Noam Chomsky
       • children have specialised language-learning mechanism
         • universality of language acquisition
         • damage to broca's area/wernickes' area as evidence

2. limitations of core knowledge systems

   • domain specific
     • each system represents only a small subset of the things and events infants percieve
   • Task specific
     • each system functions to solve a limited set of problems
   • encapsulated
     • each system operates with a fair degree of independence from other cognitive systems

3. Children's informal theories

   • young children organise their understanding of the most important domains into informal theories
     • physics
       • Spelke (2002)
         • Speculates that infants begin life with a primative theory of physics; understanding of inanimate objects
     • biology
       • develops around 3-4 years
         • realisation that there are living and nonliving things
     • psychology
       • Wellman & Gelman (1998)
         • first theory of psychology emerges around 18 months
         • organised around the understanding that other people's actions, not just one's own, reflect goals and desires

4. Spelke

   • Initial Knowledge
     • Emerges in early development
     • is domain specific
     • constrained
     • innate
     • mature knowledge
     • task specific