12.
J. T. Bruer, The Myth of the First Three Years: A New Understanding of Early Brain Development and Lifelong Learning (Free Press, 1999).
13.
‘Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid’, The Onion (1999), available at: http:// www.onion.demon.co.uk/ theonion/other/babies/ stupidbabies.htm. Check out some very cute babies being made fun of.
14.
‘Babies Are Smarter Than You Think’, Life (July 1993).
15.
Minsky quoted in Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 137: ‘The mind is a meat machine.’
16.
The story can be found all over the Internet, but I believe the most sensible consideration of the topic can be found in J. Hutchins, ‘The Whiskey Was Invisible: Or, Persistent Myths of MT’, MT News International 11 (1995), 17–18.
17.
J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690; reprint, E. P. Dutton, 1947).
18.
R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by J. Veitch (1647; reprint, Prometheus Books, 1901); I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N. K. Smith (1781; reprint, St Martin’s Press, 1965).
19.
E. S. Spelke, ‘Principles of Object Perception’, Cognitive Science 14 (1990): 29–56.
20.
J. B. Watson, Behaviourism (University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 104.
21.
B. F. Skinner, ‘Superstition in the Pigeon’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 38 (1948): 168–72.
22.
The baby crib was likened to the ‘Skinner Boxes’ that Skinner had developed for the experimental studies of the effects of rewards on animal behaviour; L. Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (Bill Daniels Co., 2004).
23.
In the Ladies’ Home Journal article (October 1945), Skinner described the benefits of raising a child in a thermostatically controlled environment so that the baby only needed to wear a diaper. He noted that behaviour and health seemed to thrive in the Air-Crib. An independent questionnaire evaluation by John M. Gray sent to 73 couples who raised 130 babies in the Air-Crib confirmed Skinner’s remarkable claims. All but three of these couples described the device as ‘wonderful’. Following the slur in Opening Skinner’s Box, Deborah Skinner wrote a scathing response to the book, ‘I Was Not a Lab Rat’, the Guardian, 12 March, 2004.
24.
H. Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (Basic Books, 1985).
25.
This scenario is a philosophical issue described as ‘the brain in a vat’ by Hilary Putnam in chapter 1 of Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 1–21.
26.
C. von Hofsten, ‘Development of Visually Guided Reaching: The Approach Phase’, Journal of Human Movement Studies 5 (1979): 160–78.
27.
J. Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (Basic Books, 1954).
28.
There have been literally hundreds of infant studies based on the principle of the magic trick, but the most famous is probably one of the first involving a solid block that appears to pass through another solid object. R. Baillargeon, E. S. Spelke, and S. Wasserman, ‘Object Permanence in Five-Month-Old Infants’, Cognition 20 (1985), 191–208.
29.
K. Wynn, ‘Addition and Subtraction by Human Infants’, Nature 358 (1992): 749–50.
30.
E. S. Spelke, ‘Core Knowledge’, American Psychologist 55 (2000): 1233–43.
31.
D. Poulon-Dubois, ‘Infants’ Distinctions Between Animate and Inanimate Objects: The Origins of Naive Psychology’, in Early Social Cognition: Understanding Others in the First Months of Life, edited by P. Rochat (Erlbaum, 1999).
32.
A. L. Woodward, ‘Infants Selectively Encode the Goal Object of an Actor’s Reach’, Cognition 69 (1998): 1–34; see also V. Kuhlmeier, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, ‘Attribution of Dispositional States by Twelve-Month-Old Infants’, Psychological Science 14 (2003): 402–8.
33.
A. Karmiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1992).
34.
G. L. Murphy and D. L. Medin, ‘The Role of Theories in Conceptual Coherence’, Psychological Review 3 (1985): 289–316.
35.
A. Karmiloff-Smith, B. In helder, ‘If You Want to Get Ahead, Get a Theory’, Cognition 23 (1975): 95–147.
36.
B. M. Hood, ‘Gravity Rules for Two- to Four-Year-Olds?’ Cognitive Development 10 (1995): 577–98.
37.
M. Tomonaga, T. Imura, Y. Mizuno, and M. Tanaka, ‘Gravity Bias in Young and Adult Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Tests with a Modified Opaque-Tubes Task’, Developmental Science 10 (2007): 411–21; see also B. Osthaus, A. M. Slater, and S. E. G. Lea, ‘Can Dogs Defy Gravity? A Comparison with the Human Infant and Nonhuman Primate’, Developmental Science 6 (2003): 489–97.
38.
I. K. Kim and E. S. Spelke, ‘Perception and Understanding of Effects of Gravity and Inertia on Object Motion’, Developmental Science 2 (1999): 339–62.
39.
M. K. Kaiser, D. R. Proffitt, and M. McCloskey, ‘The Development of Beliefs About Falling Objects’, Perception and Psychophysics 38 (1985): 533–9.
40.
M. McCloskey, A. Washburn, and L. Felch, ‘Intuitive Physics: The Straight-Down Belief and Its Origin’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 9 (1983): 636–49.
41.
J. Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929).
42.
D. Kelemen, ‘The Scope of Teleological Thinking in Preschool Children’, Cognition 70 (1999): 241–72.
43.
D. Kelemen, ‘Are Children “Intuitive Theists”?’ Psychological Science 15 (2004): 295–301.
44.
J. Piaget. The Child’s Conception of the World (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929).
45.
D. Hume, Natural History of Religion (1757, reprint Clarendon Press, 1976).
46.
J. D. Woolley, ‘Thinking About Fantasy: Are Children Fundamentally Different Thinkers and Believers from Adults?’ Child Development 68 (1997): 991–1011; J. D. Woolley and K. E. Phelps, ‘Young Children’s Practical Reasoning About Imagination’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 12 (1994): 53–67.
47.
C. N. Johnson and P. L. Harris, ‘Magic: Special but Not Excluded’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 12 (1994): 35–51.
48.
E. V. Subbotsky, ‘Explanations of Unusual Events: Phenomenalistic Causal Judgements in Children and Adults’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 15 (1997): 13–36.