Abstract

A current and very influential theory in psychology holds that infants have innate, perceptually informed systems that endow them with surprisingly high-level concepts—for example, concepts of cardinality and causality. Proponents of core cognition hold that these initial concepts then provide the building blocks for later adult ideas within these domains. This paper reviews the evidence for core cognition and argues that these systems aren’t sufficient to explain how children learn their way to adult thoughts about language, number, or cause.