The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought JEAN MATER MANDLER OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The Foundations of Mind Oxford Series in Cognitive Development Series Editors Paul Bloom and Susan A. Gelman The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought Susan A. Gelman The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought Jean Matter Mandler The Foundations of Mind Origins of Conceptual Thought JEAN MATTER MANDLER 1  3 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright ©  by Jean Matter Mandler Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.  Madison Avenue, New York, New York  www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mandler, Jean Matter. The foundations of mind : origins of conceptual thought / by Jean Matter Mandler. p. cm. — (Oxford series in cognitive development) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- . Cognition in infants. . Concepts in infants. I. Title. II. Series. BF.C M  .'—dc   Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Peter and Michael For whose sake I wish I had understood these issues 40 years ago This page intentionally left blank Preface This is a book about meaning, in particular conceptual meaning and how it arises in the human mind. Sadly, psychologists have more or less aban- doned the study of meaning in recent years. This trend is due in part to the diversion of research to the study of the brain. An unfortunate side effect of otherwise exciting research on brain functioning is an increas- ing tendency to explain everything in terms of the way the brain works, skipping the mind altogether. But the brain cannot tell us about mean- ing. That is the province of the mind, and if psychology does not pay at- tention to the way the mind processes meaning, it is in danger of losing its central core. In this book I address the foundations of the conceptual mind—how we come to be able to interpret the world and to think about it. Although much of my inspiration came from studying Piaget, the story I tell (in- formally known as How to Build a Baby) is a markedly different account of infancy and the foundations of mind from his. No one today can claim to replace Piagetian theory in its entirety. Perhaps that is because we now have so much more data and in that sense know so much more than Pi- aget did. All the ins and outs we have come to appreciate make it much more daunting to encompass the development of mind from its inception to its culmination in adulthood. Nevertheless, it seems possible to start at the beginning and ask: Is this the right way to go? This book is the result Preface viii of years of research that insistently has said: No, the infant does not start out in the way that Piaget assumed. Infants appear to be conceptual be- ings from the start, without going through an extensive sensorimotor pe- riod lacking any conceptual thought. I attempt to show not only that this is so but also what some of the earliest thoughts might be like. My position will be controversial, not least because it makes a clear distinction between percepts and concepts. I recently attended a conference on conceptual knowledge that brought together cognitive, developmen- tal, and comparative psychologists, anthropologists, neuropsychologists, and neurobiologists. At the last session of the conference, the participants were asked to define what they meant by conceptual knowledge. The an- swers were dismaying. There were roughly as many opinions about how to define conception, perception, and their relationships as there were speak- ers. It seems incredible that we have been in the mind business for hun- dreds of years and have not yet agreed on some definitions of the terms we all use in our work. We still reside in a Tower of Babel, and until we knock it down or leave it, I doubt that progress will be made. I do not expect consensus soon. I do ask, however, that anyone writ- ing on these issues try as clearly as possible to set out their conditions of use of the terms perception and conception. Needless to say, the particular terms we use do not matter. As I discuss in chapter , the distinctions I make are sometimes referred to as procedural and declarative, sometimes as implicit and explicit knowledge. In spite of different terminology, each of these sets of terms captures some of the distinctions I believe we need to make if we are to understand how the conceptual mind develops. These distinctions also explain some persistent controversies in de- velopment, such as why it is that infants can see the difference between a dog and a cat by  months of age but do not distinguish them on some tests until months later, why infants pass number tests that they fail as preschoolers, or why they seem to have knowledge about physics that ap- parently deserts them a few years later. These discrepancies are often at- tributed to task-dependent knowledge, but that seems to me too narrow a way to describe them. Many tasks can be solved in more than one way, and it is important to know whether implicit perceptual knowledge or explicit conceptual knowledge is being used to do so. This book explores these issues, illustrating them extensively in the areas of categorization, inference, and memory tasks. In these pages there is relatively little discussion of cultural influences on infant conceptual development. Infants are to some extent shielded from such influences by their lack of language. Of course, even without language, culture has at least some effects. As we will see, concepts of cars and motorcycles are an early achievement of urban California in- fants that would not be found in infants raised in a forest culture. Con- versely, urban California infants are slower to develop knowledge about animals and plants than about artifacts, which might not be true for for- est- or farm-raised infants. However, the ability to recall past events, cat- egorize objects and spatial relations, and learn the important basics of language are all governed by universal factors common to infants in all cultures. It is when the foundations have been laid down and the naming practices of the culture begin to teach the infant which details are im- portant that we begin to see more cultural influence. This issue is illus- trated in chapter , in which learning relational concepts and the words that express them are the main focus. There is also little discussion in this book of parental influences on infant learning. This is due mainly to my conviction that the earliest conceptual learning and memory develop- ment are more a function of what infants observe and analyze than of what parents try to teach. It is possible that I underestimate parental in- fluence in this regard, but in any case I hope readers will come to appre- ciate just how much infants can achieve on their own. The first three chapters of this book describe the methods we use to study infant conceptual development, the brilliant but ultimately unsatis- fying theory of Piaget on sensorimotor development, and the necessity for a dual representational system to account for infants’ cognitive functioning. Chapters  and  describe the heart of my theory of concept formation in infancy, describing perceptual meaning analysis, the image-schemas that arise from it, and how these can be combined into the concepts that in- fants form. Chapter  explains why the first concepts about objects can- not be at the basic level and makes clear why we must distinguish between perceptual and conceptual categories. Chapters  and  summarize much of the data collected in my laboratory on the kinds of global concepts that infants first form and then how these concepts are used to make the inferences that build up the knowledge base. Chapter  also reprises the theory introduced in chapters  and . Chapter  discusses the lifetime continuity from infant to adult in concepts of objects and compares ac- Preface ix [...]... explain what they know They are interpreters of the world around them from an early age We don’t yet know how early, although Werner and Kaplan’s () estimate of  months as the onset of contemplation of the world cannot be much more than  months off the mark! The very young infant who cannot yet act upon objects is never-   The Foundations of Mind theless construing the actions of others This... for the way in which the information is stored and for whether or not it is retrievable Therefore, even though the distinction between percepts and concepts and a single or dual representational system are independent of each other, each must be considered before we can create a theory of how the conceptual mind is constructed So we embark on a journey to explore the conceptual foundations of mind There... in the Conceptual System: Acquisition, Breakdown, and Reorganization  The Initial Organization of the Conceptual System 201 Breakdown of the Conceptual System 208 Conceptual Growth Versus Conceptual Reorganization 213  Recall of the Past  Recall of Absent Objects 223 Recall Versus Recognition of Events 227 Deferred Imitation of Events 230 What Deferred Imitation Measures 233 The Nature of Preverbal... accomplished on the basis of the implicit object-tracking mechanism previously mentioned.) So in my terminology the notion of the “object concept” is an oversimplification Infants learn a lot of implicit nonconceptual information about objects, but in addition they also conceptualize them in a more explicit way Another example of a serious lack of definition of commonly used terms is the claim that the first... formed, and they are reminded of absent ob-   The Foundations of Mind jects and events by this or that cue and recall them These capacities mean that from the start babies are forming a declarative knowledge system, one that they use to give meaning to what they see and that a year later will help them acquire language to talk about what they see This is a rather different baby from the one described... than they have typically been given credit for They observe the world and theorize about it, albeit in a primitive way Right from the beginning, or at least from a few months of age, babies function in ways that merge continuously into those of older children and adults They form concepts, they have notions of different kinds, they generalize from their experiences on the basis of the concepts they... no conceptual life Instead, babies are described as sensorimotor creatures who understand the world solely through their perceptual and motor systems They recognize things they have seen before, they can move themselves and manipulate objects, but they have no concepts and so cannot think, recall the past, or imagine the future This view, of course, is a legacy of Piaget I discuss his theory of how thought. .. concept of animal without a commitment to any particular kind of shape or features We cannot make this leap as a matter of course but must examine what infants actually do Is it the case that they form perceptual schemas of the objects that surround them and use this perceptual base as the glue to hold associations together? Do they understand dogs as the same kind of thing because they look alike and then... various properties with this kind of object? This is an entrenched view,   The Foundations of Mind but when we examine what infants are doing in detail, it does not do a good job of describing the data This view of the foundation of the conceptual mind as consisting of associations accruing to perceptual schemas pervades our thinking not only about infancy but also about the preschool years Young children... the days of the grand learning theories of Hull and Spence, a single representational system was assumed Of course, behaviorists would have rejected the notion of representation, so they talked instead about a common set of mechanisms that was assumed to apply to all processing (We may be heading back to this view today, as connectionism has gained sway in the field.) Even earlier, in the days of the . Gelman The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought Susan A. Gelman The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought Jean Matter Mandler The Foundations of Mind Origins of. The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought JEAN MATER MANDLER OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The Foundations of Mind Oxford Series in Cognitive Development Series. otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mandler, Jean Matter. The foundations of mind : origins of conceptual thought