''Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development'' is a book regarding gene/environment interaction by Jeffrey Elman, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett published in 1996. It has been cited about 4,000 times in scientific articles, and has been nominated as one of the "One hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th Century".

Summary

''Rethinking Innateness'' applied insights from

neurobiology Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, ...

and

neural network A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a network can perfor ...

modelling to brain development. It questioned whether some of the "hard nativist" positions, such as those adopted by

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychology, cognitive psychologist, psycholinguistics, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psycholo ...

and Elizabeth Spelke, are biologically plausible. For example, the authors challenged a claim by Pinker that children are born with innate domain-specific knowledge of the principles of grammar, by questioning how the knowledge that Pinker suggests might actually be encoded in the genes. Elman et al. argue that information concerning something as specific as grammatical rules (which they classify as

proposition A proposition is a statement that can be either true or false. It is a central concept in the philosophy of language, semantics, logic, and related fields. Propositions are the object s denoted by declarative sentences; for example, "The sky ...

al information) could only be encoded as pre-specified "weights" between neurons in the cortex. But they argue that evidence from a number of sources, such as brain plasticity (the ability of a brain to change its response properties during development) shows that information cannot be hard-wired in this way. Instead, they argue that genes might influence brain development by determining a system's "architectural constraints". By establishing the physical structure of a system, they argue that genes would, in effect, be determining the learning algorithms the system employs to respond to the environment. They argue that the specific propositional information in the system would be determined as a result of the system responding to environmental stimulation.

Influences

The ideas in ''Rethinking Innateness'' have been influential and developed in a number of ways. For example Mark Johnson has gone on to develop his Interactive Specialization hypothesis, in part building on ideas from ''Rethinking Innateness''. Jeffrey Elman has also gone on to become one of the most widely recognized figures in computational neuroscience, recently being awarded th
David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science

References

Cognitive science literature {{science-book-stub

Summary

Influences

See also

References