The Nature-Nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (Outcome X is so peculiar that it must be innate), (2) species specificity (we are the only species who do X, so X must lie in the human genome), (3) localization (Outcome X is mediated by a particular part of the brain, so X must be innate), and (4) learnability (we cannot figure out how X could be learned, so X must be innate). We believe that an explicit and plausible theory of interaction is now around the corner, and that many of the classic maneuvers to defend or attack innateness will soon disappear. In the interim, some serious errors can be avoided if we keep these confounded issues apart. That is the major goal of this paper, i.e., not to attack innateness but to clarify what

The term “aphasia ” refers to acute or chronic impairment of language, an acquired condition that is most often associated with damage to the left side of the brain, usually due to trauma or stroke. We have known about the link between left-hemisphere damage and language loss for more than a century (Goodglass, 1993). For almost as long, we have also known that the lesion/symptom correlations observed in adults do not appear to hold for very young children (Basser, 1962; Lenneberg, 1967). In fact, in the absence of other complications, infants with congenital damage to one side of the brain (left or right) usually go on to acquire language abilities that are well within the normal range (Eisele & Aram, 1995; Feldman, Holland, & Janosky, 1992; Vargha-Khadem, Isaacs, & Muter,

Conventional behaviors develop from practice for regularly occurring problems of coordination within a community of actors. Re-using and extending conventional methods for coordinating behavior is the task of everyday reasoning. The

ACT-R is a general theory of cognition (Anderson, 1993; Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) which is capable of learning the relative usefulness of alternative rules. In this paper, a model utilising this implicit procedural learning mechanism is described which explains results from a concept formation task created by McDonald and MacWhinney (1991), a role assignment task for artificial languages created by Blackwell (1995), and a new role assignment experiment. By focusing learning on one cue of role assignment at a time, the model predicts a blocking phenomenon where certain cues can dominate and partially block the learning of other cues. In all of the experiments, subjects’ trial-by-trial use of cues is better predicted by the ACT-R model than by a pure learning-on-error model that learns all cues simultaneously.

The Nature-Nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (Outcome X is so peculiar that it must be

This paper discusses the motivation behind the nativist position with respect to linguistic knowledge. In particular, the discussion focusses on the argument from the "poverty of the stimulus", which is generally assumed to be the most important argument in favor of a nativist position. On the basis of current views on human reasoning and learning, we will argue that the logical (i.e., non-empirical) part of the poverty of the stimulus argument is invalid. This result substantially weakens the nativist position, although it does not imply that the assumption that there must exist a certain amount of innate domain-specific knowledge has to be abandoned altogether.

Research in language evolution is concerned with the question of how complex linguistic structures can emerge from the interactions between many communicating individuals. At such

Models of Object Shape: The Role of Category Learning and Action Max Lungarella and Rolf Pfeifer (AI-Laboratory, University of Zurich, Switzerland): Robots as Cognitive Tools Lorenzo Natale (Lira-Lab, University of Genoa, Italy): Visuo-Acoustic Cue Integration in an Artificial Developing Agent Michael Thomas (Neurocognitive Development Unit, University College London, UK): Developmental disorders as atypical trajectories of development: Empirical and computational approaches Mark Johnson (Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College, London, UK):Interacting factors in the development of face processing Posters Luc Berthouze and Adriaan Tijsseling: Embodiment is Meaningless without Adequate Neural Dynamics Joanna Bryson: Embodiment vs. Memetics: Does Language Need a Physical Plant? Michael H. Coen: Issues in Intersensory Perception for Interactive Systems Steve R. Howell, Suzanna Becker and Damian Jankowicz: Modelling Language Acquisition: Lexical Grounding Through Perceptual Features Joris van Looveren: Self-Organization of a Lexicon in Embodied Agents Koji Morikawa, Sameer Agarwal, Charles Elkan and Garrison W. Cottrell: A Taxonomy of Computational and Social Learning Natsuki Oka, Koji Morikawa, Takanori Komatsu, Kentaro Suzuki, Kazuo Hiraki, Kazuhiro Ueda, Takashi Omori: Embodiment without a Physical Body Jochen Triesch: The Role of a priori Biases in Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations: A Robotics Experiment (Will not be presented at the workshop.) Rachel Wood: The Brains Bodies Build: Some Preliminary Ideas on Allometry in Ontogenetic Adaptation Jelle Zuidema and Gert Westermann: Towards Formal Models of Embodiment and Selforganisation of Language Program Committee Rolf Pfeifer (co-chair, AI Lab, University of...

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