Annette Karmiloff-Smith was a seminal thinker in the field of child development in a career
spanning more than 45 years. She was the recipient of many awards, including the …

What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a single cell to grow into
a sentient adult? The processes that occur along the way are so complex that any attempt to …

Recent technological advances allow us to measure how the infant brain functions in ways
that were not possible just a decade ago. Although methodological advances are exciting …

In recent years, nativism has come under repeated attack from advocates of a new
developmental program: neuroconstructivism. 1 Armed primarily with results from theoretical …

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that there is no single influence (be it nature or nurture) on
cognitive development. Cognitive abilities emerge as a result of interactions between gene …

In Section 1, I introduce three views that explain human cognitive development from different
standpoints: Marcus's neo-nativism, standard neuroconstructivism, and neo …

For years, the view that the human cognitive system is as a Swiss army knife with innately
specified functional modules that come online one by one or can be impaired independently …

The brain is by far the most complex organ in the human body and probably the most
intricate system in the whole of the universe. Containing some 100 billion nerve cells (or …

The study of genetic developmental disorders originally seemed to hold the promise for
those of a nativist persuasion of demonstrating pure dissociations between different …

A deep theoretical tension lies at the heart of developmental cognitive science. Children–
even infants–have abstract structured representations of the world: intuitive theories and …