ABSTRACT
The increasing respectability accorded to nativist models means that some innate content is now seen as almost self-evident. Nativist models tend to be disappointing, therefore, with regard to opportunities for intervention to promote development. In the standard picture, genes are codes for characters or "parts" of characters which are then "selected" by the kinds of environmental problems encountered, resulting in progressive "shaping" of the character and its successful "adaptation" to the problem. Notions of knowledge as parcels of experience, and of reasoning as the logical rules by which these are moved, shuffled, interrelated, converted, or combined to produce more complex parcels, are old ones, and the idea of "natural mechanics" pre-dates the recent resurgence of nativism. Children’s speech-rate increases with age: so, the faster the sub-vocal rehearsal, the greater the number of items that can be maintained.
