David Barner

Ok fine I'll take the bait.... I'm a constructivist which I think makes me a cop-out on this question, but here goes anyway. The Nat/Emp distinction connects with but is not equal to: 1. The nature-nurture debate 2. Presence at birth 3. Universality 4. Domain-specificity 5. And oh, so much more.

But the real problem, imo, is that innateness claims which are based on early emergence often lack exactly what a good nativist-empiricist approach requires, which is a mechanistic account of how a behavior emerges from interactions through learning mechanisms & inputs (e.g., see infant ToM).

Ok fine I'll take the bait.... I'm a constructivist which I think makes me a cop-out on this question, but here goes anyway. The Nat/Emp distinction connects with but is not equal to: 1. The nature-nurture debate 2. Presence at birth 3. Universality 4. Domain-specificity 5. And oh, so much more.

The nativist-empiricist distinction is useful because it's a call to build precise computational models of learning. But it's fundamentally not a debate about whether experience matters, if babies can do everything at birth, etc.

Ok fine I'll take the bait.... I'm a constructivist which I think makes me a cop-out on this question, but here goes anyway. The Nat/Emp distinction connects with but is not equal to: 1. The nature-nurture debate 2. Presence at birth 3. Universality 4. Domain-specificity 5. And oh, so much more.

Though Nat/Emp is NOT the same as the domain-specificity debate. We can learn domain-specific representations, and domain specific representations can be innate.

Ok fine I'll take the bait.... I'm a constructivist which I think makes me a cop-out on this question, but here goes anyway. The Nat/Emp distinction connects with but is not equal to: 1. The nature-nurture debate 2. Presence at birth 3. Universality 4. Domain-specificity 5. And oh, so much more.

Consequently, an innate mechanism placed in different environments may produce differences in traits and behaviors. Innate learning mechanisms may take months or years to produce adult-like behaviors. Or behaviors may emerge at birth.

Ok fine I'll take the bait.... I'm a constructivist which I think makes me a cop-out on this question, but here goes anyway. The Nat/Emp distinction connects with but is not equal to: 1. The nature-nurture debate 2. Presence at birth 3. Universality 4. Domain-specificity 5. And oh, so much more.

Most ppl's training on this issue ends with the NN debate in Intro Psych. It's not the same debate: NN relates to explaining variability in TRAITS and BEHAVIORS among individuals who are biologically similar & bring similar mechanisms to learning. N/E is about the latter & how learning works.

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our study, and work by Syrett & Aravind finds that the adult semantics allows partial objects to be named & counted - and most count "four forks" in images like this.

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

When participants were asked to count the mugs, adults basically never did, regardless of speaker goals, children continued to do so at elevated rates.

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

In the study, we also considered whether the intended function of objects might play a role in exclusion, as argued by Syrett & Aravind. Maybe adults exclude a half fork because they know speakers have useful forks in mind, whereas kids don't?

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

In a follow-up we showed kids & adults images like these & simply asked them to label what they saw.

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

However, as soon as these same partial objects are accompanied by complementary parts, adults no longer count partial objects as "one" each, presumably because they now encode them as "pieces of forks" rather than as forks. They either exclude both complementary parts, or "count-combine".