Susan Carey: Harvard Department of Psychology

I make two non-controversial assumptions about human conceptual understanding. First, it is built from a shared set of developmental primitives–the representational resources bequeathed to all human beings by evolution. Equally obviously, human cultures create new representational resources, transcending these initial ones in format, content and expressive power, which are turn internalized by individuals in the course of conceptual development. These assumptions, even if granted, leave open radically different possibilities concerning the processes of conceptual development and the scope for cross-cultural variation. How rich are the developmental primitives? How constraining of adult cognition are they? Does human conceptual development require transcending the initial state, and if so, what mechanisms make this possible? .

I will illustrate an empirical research program addressing this space of theoretical options in the domain of numerical cognition, focusing on the developmental primitives with numerical content, the cultural construction of integer representations, and the bootstrapping processes that allow each child to transcend their initial representational resources, creating representations of natural number.