Rethinking Innateness

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Rethinking Innateness

Published in 1996 by Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey L. Elman is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive science at the Ucsd. He is a well-known psycholinguistics and pioneer in the field of neural networks....
, Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Annette Karmiloff-Smith is a professorial research fellow at the Developmental Neurocognition Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. She is an expert in developmental disorders, with a particular interest in Williams syndrome....
, Elizabeth Bates

Elizabeth Bates

Elizabeth Bates was a Professor of psychology and cognitive science at the UCSD. She was an internationally-renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurolinguistics, and she authored 10 books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects....
, Mark Johnson

Mark H. Johnson (professor)

Mark Johnson is a British cognitive neuroscientist who since 1997 is head of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London....
, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett, Rethinking Innateness has had a significant influence on our understanding of gene/environment interaction. It has been cited more than 1,000 times in scientific articles , and has been nominated as one of the “One hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th Century” (Minnesota Millennium Project).

Summary
Rethinking Innateness applied insights from neurobiology

Neurobiology

Neurobiology is the study of cell s of the nervous system and the organization of these cells into functional biological neural network that process information and mediate behavior....
and neural network

Neural network

Traditionally, the term neural network had been used to refer to a network or circuit of neuron. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes....
modelling to brain development.

It questioned whether some of the “hard nativist

Psychological nativism

In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at Childbirth. This is in contrast to Empiricism, the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate be...
” positions, such as those adopted by Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
, Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

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Encyclopedia

Published in 1996 by Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey L. Elman is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive science at the Ucsd. He is a well-known psycholinguistics and pioneer in the field of neural networks....
, Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Elizabeth Bates

Mark H. Johnson (professor)

Summary

Rethinking Innateness applied insights from neurobiology

Neurobiology

Neural network

Psychological nativism

Noam Chomsky

Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychology, cognitive science, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind....
and Elisabeth 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 propositional 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 plasiticity (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, by 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 hugely influential and have been developed in a number of ways. For example Mark Johnson

Mark H. Johnson (professor)

Mark Johnson is a British cognitive neuroscientist who since 1997 is head of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London....
has gone on to develop his Interactive Specialization

Interactive Specialization

Interactive Specialization is a theory of brain development proposed by the British cognitive neuroscientist Mark Johnson, who is head of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London, London....
hypothesis, in part building on ideas from Rethinking Innateness. Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey L. Elman is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive science at the Ucsd. He is a well-known psycholinguistics and pioneer in the field of neural networks....
has also gone on to become one of the most widely recognized figures in computational neuroscience, recently being awarded the .