Arguments over the developmental origins of human knowledge are
ancient, founded in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes,
Hume, and Kant. They have also persisted long enough to become a
core area of inquiry in cognitive and developmental science.
Empirical contributions to these debates, however, appeared only in
the last century, when Jean Piaget offered the first viable theory
of knowledge acquisition that centered on the great themes
discussed by Kant: object, space, time, and causality. The essence
of Piaget's theory is constructivism: The building of concepts from
simpler perceptual and cognitive precursors, in particular from
experience gained through manual behaviors and observation.
The constructivist view was disputed by a generation of researchers
dedicated to the idea of the "competent infant," endowed with
knowledge (say, of permanent objects) that emerged prior to facile
manual behaviors. Taking this possibility further, it has been
proposed that many fundamental cognitive mechanisms -- reasoning,
event prediction, decision-making, hypothesis testing, and
deduction -- operate independently of all experience, and are, in
this sense, innate. The competent-infant view has an intuitive
appeal, attested to by its widespread popularity, and it enjoys a
kind of parsimony: It avoids the supposed philosophical pitfall
posed by having to account for novel forms of knowledge in
inductive learners. But this view leaves unaddressed a vital
challenge: to understand the mechanisms by which new knowledge
arises.
This challenge has now been met. The neoconstructivist approach is
rooted in Piaget's constructivist emphasis on developmental
mechanisms, yet also reflects modern advances in our understanding
of learning mechanisms, cortical development, and modeling. This
book brings together, for the first time, theoretical views that
embrace computational models and developmental neurobiology, and
emphasize the interplay of time, experience, and cortical
architecture to explain emergent knowledge, with an empirical line
of research identifying a set of general-purpose sensory,
perceptual, and learning mechanisms that guide knowledge
acquisition across different domains and through development.
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