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Core Knowledge Perspective
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The Core Knowledge Perspective is an evolutionary theory in child development (developmental psychology) that proposes "infants begin life with innate, special-purpose knowledge systems referred to as core domains of thought" There are five core domains of thought, each of which is crucial for survival, which simultaneously prepare us to develop key aspects of early cognition. The five core domains are: physical, numerical, linguistic, psychological, and biological. Physical knowledge is an infant’s comprehension of objects and their effects on one another. For instance, five month-olds understand that some objects are too wide for some openings as they gain the understanding of object solidity. Using the violation-of-expectation method, infants hold a longer gaze at an object entering a container that has a closed top than when they are showed the object entering an open container. Numerical knowledge is the concept that infants are capable of keeping a slight track of quantity, and therefore are capable of minimal mathematics. It has been suggested that infants as young as five months can discriminate quantities up to three. Other research indicates that six month-olds can approximate the difference between a large set of items and a small set of items when there is a significant difference. Studies done on infant numerical knowledge have mixed findings. The findings are also relatively controversial because many believe that the infant is expressing a visual preference rather than doing math. Linguistic knowledge is the rapid acquisition of language. By six months-old infants are able to distinguish between tones that are and are not a part of their native language. The psychological domain is the understanding that individuals are different and express mental states (emotions), which therefore impacts their behavior. This domain develops later than the others because a young child’s theory of mind and ability to take others’ perspectives is significantly minimal. The final domain, biological, is the concept that infants understand basic human biology, such as birth, growth, and death. Core knowledge theorists view children as naïve theorists where the children explore the world and simultaneously form theories based on their innate knowledge.
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