The Initial Representational Repertoire: The Empiricist Picture
This chapter argues that the Piagetian/Quinian view of the young infant's representational capacities being exhausted by a perceptual similarity space, or a set of sensori-motor primitives, is most probably wrong. The argument takes three steps. First, it is argued that representations of object cannot be stated in the vocabulary of perception. Second, some of the evidence that young infants represent objects themselves as spatio-temporally continuous are reviewed, quantifying over these representations as do adults. Third, the chapter considers whether infants' performance in the experiments might better be explained in terms of generalizations stated over a perceptual vocabulary.
Keywords: developmental primitives, sensory representations, conceptual representations, Piagetian/Quinian view, representations of objects
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