Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science

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Summary: A model for child's cognitive development
Review: Cognitive development has been the issue of research and debate for years. Many theories have been proposed in order to effectively describe and explain cognitive development. Two of those theories are Fodor's nativism and Piaget's constructivism.

In the specific book, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, a student of Piaget, is proposing a model of child cognitive development. The author's effort is concentrated on connecting Fodor's nativism (existance of modules,predispostitions in a neonate's mind) and Piaget's theory of constructivism (all aspects of knowledge are part of a domain-general cognitive development and occur during the interaction with the environment).

Karmiloff-Smith supports the existance of innately specified attention biases and predispositions of the human mind which develop through a sequence of subsequent changes.

According to Karmiloff-Smith the child must be born with a set of pre-wired modules that account a variety of cognitive skills. Unlike Fodor, Karmiloff-Smith supports that during development the modules start interacting and working together. Initially, children learn by instinct, or at least "implicitly". Then their thinking develops, and consists of redescribing the world from an implicit form to more and more explicit forms, to more and more verbal knowledge.

The author's model contains a key-idea called "representational redescription". Representational redescription occurs through three stages: first the child learns to become a master of some activity (phase 1); then she analyzes introspectively what she has learned (phase 2); and, finally, she reconciles her performance with her introspection (phase 3). This process involves re-coding information from one representational format to another. The same "redescription" process operates within each module, but not necessarily at the same pace. In each domain, children acquire domain-specific principles that augment the general-purpose principles (such as representational redescription) that guide their cognitive life. Finally, mapping across domains and the innate predespositions is a fundamental achievement by the child's mind.

The book consists of five chapters which describe how cognitive development occurs in five different spheres of mental activity. Karmiloff shows how children start with innate dispositions for language, achieve linguistic mastery and then develop metalinguistic knowledge through representational redescription. Analogously, the child masters the physical objects and later develops a naive Physics of her own (a theory of object behavior). Same applies to Mathematics and to Psychology (children develop a theory of mind that explains the behavior of other individuals).

The main idea of this book lies in the fact that to account for development it is necessary to invoke an integration of aspects of nativism and constructivism, along with a cognitive architecture that enables representational redescription.