Beyond Modularity: Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science

by Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Taking a stand midway between Piaget's constructivism and Fodor's nativism, Annette Karmiloff-Smith offers an exciting new theory of developmental change that embraces both approaches. She shows how each can enrich the other and how both are necessary to a fundamental theory of human cognition. Karmiloff-Smith shifts the focus from what cognitive science can offer the study of development to what a developmental perspective can offer cognitive science. In Beyond Modularity she treats cognitive development as a serious theoretical tool, presenting a coherent portrait of the flexibility and creativity of the human mind as it develops from infancy to middle childhood.

Language, physics, mathematics, commonsense psychology, drawing, and writing are explored in terms of the relationship between the innate capacities of the human mind and subsequent representational change which allows for such flexibility and creativity. Karmiloff-Smith also takes up the issue of the extent to which development involves domain-specific versus domain-general processes. She concludes with discussions of nativism and domain specificity in relation to Piagetian theory and connectionism, and shows how a developmental perspective can pinpoint what is missing from connectionist models of the mind.

Genres: Psychology

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Development is about procedural knowledge becoming explicit through (two main) stages of redescription (theory-in-action and... fully-fledged theory, I guess). AKS is trying to steer a course between nativism (the child's mind is designed to pay attention to specific things) and constructivism (but the child doesn't stop at behavioural mastery, unlike, AKS says, the chimp). The idea of representational redescription is that knowledge is made usable (for other purposes) by being redescribed in another format, but this redescription, AKS stresses, is not necessarily linguistic. So what makes human cognition unique is that human infants take their own representations as objects.

The 'representational redescription' (RR) model borrows from Piaget the idea that development essentially follows stages, with RR being sort of the high road to some form of domain generality, since knowledge is made available for other uses by being redescribed--though AKS is not perfectly clear on how that works.

Some great experimental data here, notably on: mistaken uses for signs for 'I' and 'You' in ASL, the balancing blocks task, children inventing observation to fit their working theory, children sorting toys following conceptual, not perceptual, similarity, children drawing 'a house that doesn't exist' and 'a man that doesn't exist' (they either subtract/add features of a man/house, or of other things as well, depending on what 'level' of redescription they have reached).

I learned a lot from this book, I wonder how relevant it still is, I'd like to read more development psychology like that.

[Manuel Pita · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the key references used to explain creativity from an AI standpoint. First theoretical work that integrated constructivism and nativism.

[Natasa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nicely written book that has made me understand that development is all about change, in particular the mechanisms of change. I am very glad I read it.