The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has sent out to reviewers the précis of a book, "What Babies Know" by Elizabeth S. Spelke, Harvard Psychology Dept. The abstract of her précis:
Where does human knowledge begin? Research on human infants, children, adults, and non- human animals, using diverse methods from the cognitive, brain, and computational sciences, provides evidence for six early emerging, domain-specific systems of core knowledge. These automatic, unconscious systems are situated between perceptual systems and systems of explicit concepts and beliefs. They emerge early in infancy, guide children’s learning, and function throughout life.
Spelke lists domain-specific core systems that are ancient, emerge early in life, and are invariant over later development. These deal with vision, objects, places, number, core knowledge, agents, social cognition, and language. Figures in the précis illustrate basic experiments characterizing the core systems. Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the precis by emailing me.
