ABSTRACT
I think that it is fair to say that there are currently three clearly different approaches to the study of the development of intelligent behaviour. Each has its enthusiastic supporters and its critics, and each has produced some notable contributions to our knowledge of children’s intelligence. One of these approaches, a relatively recent arrival on the scene, denies that there is much intellectual development-at any rate in any deep sense (Gelman and Gallistel 1978; Spelke et al. 1992; Starkey et al. 1990; Johnson and Morton 1991). The people who take this view agree that some quite remarkable changes take place in children’s behaviour as they grow older, but argue that these are changes mainly on the surface. There is no deep change, they claim: children are born with most of their fundamental intellectual capacities intact and their main task in childhood is to learn how to deploy these intellectual mechanisms effectively.
