Cognitive Development
mixingmemory | May 9, 2008Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it begins with Judges 12:5-6 as an epigraph. In that passage, group membership is determined by having individuals pronounce a word, and if they can't pronounce it properly, they're killed. Kinzler et al. then provide a host of examples of what we might call linguistic discrimination in their opening paragraph:
The biblical story of Shibboleth speaks of the…
mixingmemory | October 3, 2007I am deathly afraid of brown recluses like the one in the picture, the nasty little bugger. I never put on a pair of jeans without shaking them first, 'cause they like warm, dark places (and I know someone who was bitten by one hiding in her jeans), and when I recently found one in my medicine cabinet, I strongly considered moving. Other spiders? Who cares? Some of them are even kind of cute. But if you want to see me jump, show me a brown recluse in a jar (if you want to see me run, open the jar).
I tell you this to assure you of my deep, visceral appreciation of the need for an innate…
mixingmemory | June 26, 2007It's now clear that by age 3, children have a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, which includes an understanding of the limits of the causal powers of thought. They know that thoughts cause behaviors and other thoughts, but they're also aware that simply thinking about something can't affect it. Except, according to a recent paper by Woolley, Browne, and Boerger(1), when it comes to wishing. They cite results from a study by Vikan and Clausen(2) in which 96% of 4 to 6-year old children believed that their wishes could affect others. Which raises an interesting question: when do children…