Developmental Biology and "Innate" Mental Structure

Recent research in brain development and cognitive development leads to an apparent paradox. One set of recent experiments suggests that infants are well-endowed with sophisticated mechanisms for learning language and analyzing the world; another set of recent experiments suggests that brain development is extremely flexible. In this talk, I review various ways of resolving the implicit tension between the two, and close with a proposal for a novel computational approach to reconciling nativism with developmental flexibility.