HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

''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 disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...
and neural network 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 public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
,
Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. ...
and
Elizabeth Spelke Elizabeth Shilin Spelke FBA (born May 28, 1949) is an American cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experi ...
, 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 In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
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


See also

* Innateness hypothesis *
Connectionism Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial in ...


References

Cognitive science literature {{science-book-stub