[SOUND] So what metaphor will we use for the mind? How will we describe our thinking? I've told you in some sense that many people think of it as a computational process. Across the history of psychology, there've been movements back and forth along these lines. Initially in psychology people used what are considered tasks that involved introspection, thinking about what's going on inside somebody's mind, in their own mind, and describing it to others. The problems that were pointed out by behaviorists were quite severe, and that is that it's very difficult for us to know what's going on in our mind. Cognitive psychologists countered by suggesting, well, we can't just think about behavior, there's gotta be something going on in our mind, something that we're thinking about that's in there that causes the behavior. And so they took a computational, a computer metaphor. What's called human information processing, as a way of thinking about what's going on inside the mind. We could think of RAM as a temporary, short-term memory. The hard disk, right, or permanent memory, as being long-term memory. And so, we can come to describe memory using this computer metaphor. But in the background of this debate between behavior and thought, if you will, cognition, has been another approach. If we think about Piaget, Piaget was trained as a zoologist. So, he developed many of his ideas of adaptation, of equilibration, of accommodation. All of these types of ideas come out of biology and into developmental psychology. At the same time that this was happening, there was a whole field of cognitive neuropsychology that thought about what brain damage did to cognition. And how we could think about the brain being the organ of the mind if you will. When we take these two strands together and we consider them, we begin to think about the mind in a very different way. And that's exactly what happened in a book called, Rethinking Innateness, published in 1996 by Jeff Elman and colleagues Mark Johnson, Karm, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, and other colleagues. And what they wanted to propose in this book was that we needed to rethink the way we would consider mind or brain development, child development. And rather than thinking about it a, as a fixed entity, we would think of it as an evolving entity. One that changes over time. That genes may be markers of certain types of ability, but they're not fixed in stone. Even genetic predispositions can be altered by the environment. The best example I like to consider when people start talking about what's innate and what's not, is face recognition. Newborns will track a face across a paddle, within minutes of birth. Over time, humans develop considerable facial expertise. We're able to recognize faces. To know identity from faces, read emotion from faces, we become face experts. The vast majority of people do. There are those who have Prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces, and again that limits them in some ways. So, there's this very simple skill of tracking a face. And we could even jump in with the idea that infants are born with face knowledge. But all we know is that there's a bias towards faces. And in fact, Johnson has suggested that this is handled by a different brain circuit, a subcortical circuit, very early in life, within minutes. But that over time, this circuit biases towards faces, but eventually the cortex comes in and starts to take over and create richer and richer representations of faceness. So, very simple example that shows how the evolving structure of the brain and the experience that a human has in the environment, grows over time. Just a few minutes ago I suggested and discussed literature in which people find early development of speech processing, but speech processing isn't fixed. It continues developing, even in monolinguals over time. As they fill in more and more complex types of speech. And in fact, one of the latest developing areas of the brain is the superior temporal gyrus in the left, which actually gets more and more enlarged, if you will, across development. Even up until the 40s, suggesting again that the use of speech and auditory language continues in its sophistication for a very long time. And it begins to improve and develop over time. We can think of examples of this in the bilingual literature. There are people who can learn a second language almost with no accent, almost like natives when they're much older. Again, suggesting that speech and it's use may have a continuum. In which some people actually are able to continue and learn a second or third language later in life, and acquire almost native-like proficiency.
