Chapter 7: Core Knowledge Part I: Physics, Space, Biology, and Number

Chapter Summary

This chapter offers a perspective on the age-old question of knowledge acquisition that is
consistent with evolutionary psychology. Although instinct blindness makes the problem seem
easy (it seems like you just “know” information because you are exposed to it), knowledge
acquisition is actually a difficult computational problem. In order for a person to learn something
about a topic, that person has to bring a lot of assumptions and cognitive readiness to the table.
The core-knowledge perspective offers a solution to start solving the problem of knowledge
acquisition. Because certain domains of knowledge were particularly important to a developing
child in the EEA, there is some specialized cognitive support for knowledge acquisition in these
areas. The areas highlighted in this chapter are knowledge about objects, space, biology, and
number. The idea behind the core-knowledge theory is that children are prepared to easily learn
what the objects in these domains are and what the lawful relationships between objects in these
domains are.
In this chapter you will read about research that shows evidence that infants and young children
have a surprising amount of knowledge in these core areas. In the first year, babies know that an
object will fall if it is not supported. Four-year-olds know that parents pass traits to offspring, but
only heritable, not psychological or acquired, traits. Infants in their first year have strategies for
navigating in space. They know that if you add one to one, you should have two.
These findings may be surprising to you. They would also be surprising to Piaget. Until people
started thinking in terms of evolutionary psychology and core knowledge, Piaget’s cognitive model
prevailed, and his view of cognitive development stressed categorization based on perceptual
similarity. He would not have predicted a young child’s understanding of inheritance. Furthermore,
recent evidence of a child’s understanding of object permanence directly contradicts Piaget’s
claims regarding the relatively late development of this cognitive skill.

Learning Objectives

 In the first part of this chapter, you will read about the problem of knowledge acquisition and
learn a bit about the history of the problem. Moreover, you will be asked to think about
knowledge acquisition from an engineering perspective and how knowledge acquisition
would proceed much more efficiently with constraints on learning and domain specificity.
Then you will read about the idea of core knowledge and examine research in areas that
illustrate this concept.
 The first core domain you will learn about deals with intuitive physics including knowledge
about objects. You will read some of the groundbreaking evidence that shows that infants
have expectations about how objects in the world will move and how gravity influences
those objects.
 You will also read about Piaget’s thoughts on object permanence and recent
methodological innovations that have changed what we know about it. You will learn about
the violation of expectancy paradigm and the lessons about the early intuitive physics that
this method has revealed.
 The second domain you will be introduced to is a child’s understanding of space. What
cues do children use and what cues do they ignore when locating a hidden object? When
navigating through space, children have some cognitive tricks in common with rats and
even ants!
  The third domain of core knowledge that you will learn about is a child’s understanding of
biology. Experiments in this area have focussed on children who are slightly older, and the
development of intuitive biology appears to happen later than the development of intuitive
physics. Nonetheless, children show an impressive understanding of biology, inheritance,
growth, and death. You will read about how this early sophistication contrasts with Piaget’s
expectations, and you will read some evidence that children develop this understanding of
biology cross-culturally.
 The last domain you will read about is the area of mathematics. Again you will learn about
the violation of expectancy paradigm and, in this case, how it has revealed that very young
infants have expectations about numbers. Five-month-olds know if small sets are equal or
different. They know that if you add one to one, there should be two. You will also read that
as children grow older and learn to count, they follow reliably developing rules for counting.

Key Concepts

 constraints on learning, 178

 containment event, 188
 core knowledge, 180
 covering event, 188
 dead reckoning, 193
 domain specificity, 180
 intuitive physics, 182
 occlusion event, 188

Review Questions

1. Infants have an intuitive knowledge of the laws of physics that

a. is the same as adults’ knowledge of the laws of physics.

b. exceeds Piaget’s estimate.
c. requires extensive experience with objects.
d. is slow to develop.

2. The results of Piaget’s ‘out of sight’ experiment would have been different if he had

a. made the object more attractive to the infant.

b. made the object larger.
c. watched the infant’s body positioning.
d. turned out the lights.

3. Spelke’s experiment with a moving rod behind an occluder demonstrated that 4-month-old
infants have an understanding of

a. cohesion.
b. contact.
c. continuity.
 d. consistency.

4. In occlusion events, an object

a. is placed into a container.

b. suddenly disappears.
c. becomes invisible as it moves behind a nearer object.
d. becomes hidden by a cover.

5. Infants’ concepts in the area of intuitive physics are applied

a. very narrowly.
b. consistently when the same props are used.
c. to people but not objects.
d. uniformly across all domains.

6. Making an induction involves

a. generalizing from a category to an instance.

b. generalizing across categories.
c. discriminating between instances.
d. inferring from an instance to a category

7. Piaget believed that preschoolers are pre-causal. If he was right, then they shouldn’t be able to

a. distinguish between growing because you’ve been fed and growing because you want to
grow.
b. understand that living things get bigger.
c. see a similarity between a hummingbird and a bat.
d. understand that living things die.

8. Which of the following statements is true about numerosity?

a. Very young infants will not dishabituate when the number of objects in a display changes.
b. Very young infants cannot match numbers across modalities.
c. Numerosity in young infants exists for objects but not events.
d. Researchers disagree about whether very young infants have true representations of
numbers.

9. The idea that each item in an array should get a unique number label is called

a. the one-to-one principle.

b. the abstraction principle.
c. the order-irrelevant principle.
d. the matching principle.
10. The cardinal principle of counting is that

a. anything can be counted.

b. number labels should be spoken in the same order every time.
c. total number remains the same regardless of counting order.
d. whatever number label you give to the last item is the total.

Answer Key

1. b (p. 224)
2. d (p. 225)
3. c (p. 226)
4. c (p. 231)
5. a (p. 233)
6. a (p. 238)
7. a (pp. 244–245)
8. d (p. 245)
9. a (p. 248)
10. d (p. 248)