PSC 141 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Ontogeny, Lev Vygotsky, Joint Attention
Document Summary
Infants have a small set of innate, domain-specific systems upon which new and flexible skills (like reading, understanding attentionality) are built. Innate, so we are born with them, we come into the world with. Domain specificity in that children understanding allows them to be able to distinguish btw animate and inanimate objects: shaped by natural selection. The idea is that we have these basic abilities because they are shaped by natural selection. Some individuals are better fit for the environment than others. So, in this way its helpful to pay attention to new things: people our understanding is knowing our social partners or that having as assumption that people are engaging in goal directed behavior. Even infants are capable of showing turn taking (sticking tongue out: objects, numbers, core-knowledge methodology, habituation: a decrease in response to repeated stimulation, revealing that learning has occurred.
