Psychological nativism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For nativism as a political force, see Nativism.
In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view which states that the brain has little innate ability and almost everything is learned through interaction with the environment.
When understood as an interdisciplinary field in their own right, nativist approaches are referred to collectively as nativist theorizing.
Nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker, who argue that we are born with certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills (such as language). They argue that many such abilities would otherwise be greatly impaired without this genetic contribution (see universal grammar for an example).
Psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith has put forward a theory known as the representational redescription or RR model of development which argues against such strict nativism and which proposes that the brain may become modular through experience within certain domains (such as social interaction or visual perception) rather than modules being genetically pre-specified.
In the United Kingdom, Stephen Laurence of the University of Sheffield initiated an interdisciplinary nativist theorizing project, entitled Innateness and the Structure of the Mind, which ran from 2001 to 2004 and was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Board (AHRB). [1]
