Epigenetic Foundations of Knowledge Structures: Initial and Transcendent Constructions

Abstract

Students of cognitive development no longer treat infants as passive receivers of inputs; it is generally assumed, rather, that infants are actively involved in the construction of their own representations. In the empiricist tradition, learning is the absorption of relatively unstructured input followed by the associative induction of the rules that give the input structure. In this view, the appropriate environment is an environment that repeatedly presents the items to be associated, such as words and their referents or fractions, and the kinds of things to which they may refer. In the constructivist tradition, by contrast, learning is the construction of a model of the world and is guided by model-building principles. These model-building principles may use as a basis of induction inputs that are not temporally or spatially paired and that are related in complex ways to the inductions drawn from them. Furthermore, some of these model-building principles may operate only during the con­ struction of the initial stages of the model, causing the learner to attend to inputs and aspects of the structure of inputs that are not salient to the adult.

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