It is a truism that development involves contributions from both genes and environment, but theories differ with respect to the roles they attribute to each, which deeply affects the ways in which developmental disorders are researched. The strict nativist approach to abnormal phenotypes, inspired by adult neuropsychology and evolutionary psychology, seeks to identify impairments to domain-spec...

Language acquisition is often said to require a massive innate body of language speciic knowledge in order to overcome the poverty of stimulus. In this picture, language learning merely implies setting a number of parameters in an internal Universal Grammar. But is the primary linguistic evidence really so poor that it warrants such an extreme nativism? Is there no room for a more empiricist or...

Because innateness is such a complex and controversial issue when applied to higher level cognition, it can be useful to explore how nature and nurture interact in simpler, less controversial contexts. One such context is the study of certain aspects of visual perception—where especially rigorous models are possible, and where it is less controversial to claim that certain aspects of the visual...

One distinctive feature of human intelligence is a high level of flexibility for problem-solving. Human thought is flexible roughly in the sense that , "there is no end to the kinds of problems human reason can deal with" (Horgan & Tienson, 1996). However, no theory to date has adequately explained such unique capacity. Recently, evolutionary psychologists have confronted this challenge by buil...

Since Antiquity, a central concern of theories of language has been the question whether language is predominantly a matter of “nature” or of “nurture.” One version of this dilemma is whether language is primarily a socio-cultural reality or a biological phenomenon. British Empiricism and German Romantic ideas, interacting in complicated ways, set the stage for much of 19th century linguistic t...

Constructivism is the Piagetian notion that learning leads the child to develop new types of representations. For example, on the Piagetian view, a child is born without knowing that objects persist in time even when they are occluded; through a process of learning, the child comes to know that objects persist in time. The trouble with this view has always been the lack of a concrete, computati...

Abstract Alterity is a concept with an extensive yet elusive history. Popularly conceived of as radical difference and Otherness, I identify alterity the source much virulent forms racism, sexism, islamophobia, other dichotomies in society that pit one group against another. Coming out tradition critical qualitative inquiry, offer genealogy through various contexts disciplines focus on its use ...

As J. P. Spencer et al. (2009) argue, the theories of some developmental psychologists continue to be nativistic, even though nativism is an inherently nondevelopmental school of thought. Psychologists interested in development study the emergence of human characteristics—including predispositions—and are not content to simply catalogue competences that characterize human newborns; instead, the...

This paper argues for engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants to better conceptualise the ethics and contested ecologies associated biodiversity loss. It focuses specifically on proteas, iconic species of South Africa's threatened fynbos biome, explore possibilities an ethical dialogue between human more-than-human diversities, consider what might be gained from understanding as both ...

Abstract Recent calls for the decolonization of academy demand recognition diverse canons knowledge . Asia’s economic ascent also imparts rising confidence among Asian scholars and institutions to promote indigenous knowledge. While these global emancipation are invigorating, decolonial scholarship is prone sterile theorization, historical fixity, an overt romanticization Global South. Drawing ...