Conceptual Development

Response to Sloutsky: Taking development seriously: theories cannot emerge from associations alone

“…Neither did he provide a plausible alternative account of specific findings, including for example, that when infants see a set of objects (e.g., red apples) paired with a novel word, they interpret a novel noun as referring specifically to the object category (e.g., apples) and an adjective to an object property (e.g., red). This finding, and others like it, are at odds with Sloutsky's assertions that (1) words are merely features of the objects with which they have become associated, and (2) words (by virtue of their status as auditory information) evoke so global a response in young children as to overshadow visual information.…”

“…Finally, words acquire their meaning not only from their histories of co-occurrence with entities in the world, but also from the intricate linguistic and social systems of which they are a part. We amassed evidence from several different research programs bearing on each of these points in children ranging from six months to four years [2, 3] and outlined a detailed developmental trajectory, revealing that conceptual and linguistic capacities are available to preverbal infants and that these become increasingly precise from infancy into the preschool years.…”

A Missing Link: K-4 Biological Evolution Content Standards

“…"Contrary to conceptions of development held 30 or 40 years ago, young children can think both concretely and abstractly" (NRC 2007, p. 3). The belief that elementary children have broad cognitive limitations is no longer embraced by the cognitive developmental research community (Carey 1985;Gelman and Baillargeon 1983;Gelman and Kalish 2005;Keil et al 1998;Metz 1995;Toyama 2000).…”

Teleological reasoning about nature: intentional design or relational perspectives?

“…. .naturally biased to view nature as though it is intentionally created', [8], p. 77), has resonated throughout the cognitive sciences, influencing interpretations of concept development [9][10][11][12][13] science learning [8,14], religion and morality [15][16][17][18][19][20], and cross-cultural reasoning [7].…”