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The Cradle of Knowledge: Development of Perception in Infancy

by Philip J. Kellman and Martha E. Arterberry, MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1998. $39.50 (xiv 369 pages) ISBN 0 262 11232 9
Discussions of infant perception and cognition have been heating up recently with some of the major investigators, such as Renee Baillargeon, Marshall Haith, Andrew Meltzoff, Linda Smith, and Elizabeth Spelke, engaged in vocal and written debate at professional meetings and in issues of Infant Behavior and Development and Developmental Science15. What is the fuss about? Much of it centers on the appropriate level of richness of interpretation of the evidence, and what kinds of skills and knowledge can be attributed to infants, based on their performance in experiments conducted with habituation dishabituation and spontaneous-preference methodologies. In accordance with traditional constructivist views of development, infants may be detecting low-level stimulus variables like brightness and frequency, and gradually learning to organize them by means of experience (i.e. instruction by the environment) into more complex mental structures that eventually attain the status of representations. From a more nativist perspective, infants may be innately possessive of deep cognitive constraints, which in time take the form of theories that organize domains of knowledge. The question is whether we should characterize the infant as being primarily perceptual or intelligent. In The Cradle of Knowledge: Development of Perception in Infancy, an ambitious book that provides detailed coverage and thoughtful analyses of the literature on early perceptual development, Philip Kellman and Martha Arterberry offer the view that neither the constructivist nor nativist positions provide apt descriptions of infant development. Kellman and Arterberry espouse a different view in which infants are, at the same time, perceptual and intelligent because they are guided throughout the course of early knowledge acquisition by smart perceptual mechanisms that have evolved to extract higher-order stimulus relationships and produce output representations that constitute abstract, meaningful descriptions of the environment. The authors note that these descriptions can support ongoing action, but they also can be stored and recruited for later thought and action. The rest of cognition such as memory, categorization, thinking, and problem solving requires representations obtained from perceiving (p. 283). The perspective is ecological, and has its origins in the views of the early Gestaltists, J.J. Gibsons theory of direct perception, and E.J. Gibsons differentiation model of developmental change, but it also has a modern cognitivescience flavor (and escapes radical Gibsonianism) by invoking constructs of mechanism and representation. I am sympathetic to the views of Kellman and Arterberry, in particular, to the idea that early knowledge acquisition must proceed from a strong perceptual base. Such an approach to thinking about cognition in infants is in accordance with Robert Goldstone and Larry Barsalous recent attempts to reunite perception and conception in adults6. I would add that Kellman and Arterberrys framework for understanding perceptual development is in some respects consistent with a form of nativism that is embodied in the neural selectionist views of Jean-Pierre Changeux and Gerald Edelman. These views imply that our evolutionary history has endowed the infant with inherent sensitivities, perceptual preferences, and information-processing constraints, as well as potential knowledge (i.e. category representations and their many combinations). Such species-specific biases may account for the rapid learning observed in many of the experiments described in this book, but without building in innate content. Constructivism, too, offers possibilities for learning complex knowledgestructures (e.g. theories) from the representational primitives delivered by perception (although it also needs a number of initial constraints). For example, the new computational analyses by Denis Mareschal and Yuko Munakata7,8, which utilize recurrent connections to create dynamic visual memory, may provide a mechanism for explaining how representations of hidden objects can be built up from experience with occlusion events. Given Kellman and Arterberrys expertise in object and depth perception, it is not surprising that the book is concentrated in the domain of vision. But there is also coverage of auditory perception, intermodal correspondence, and the relation between perception and action. An early chapter provides background on biological development and sensory constraints, and their likely perceptual consequences, and might be regarded as required reading for anyone new to infant perception research. The initial, penultimate, and final chapters are the most provocative and offer informed commentary on difficult core issues such as the nature of perception,

the relation between perception and conception, and the work that remains to be done to achieve a more complete understanding of perception and its development. Some readers might find the coverage in the data-based chapters too detailed for their tastes, but it does demonstrate how empirical phenomena can vary, sometimes significantly, even with slight parametric variation. The analyses of disparate experimental findings are probing, and the authors are generous in communicating many wise suggestions for further studies that might be useful in resolving current dilemmas. Within each chapter, periodic summaries of the conclusions that the authors draw from sets of studies examining a common issue may prompt readers to ponder the findings themselves and make their own assessment of the evidence. Also, as the book progresses, certain outcomes keep reappearing (e.g. the importance of motion information for representation of objects and space), and major themes are reviewed (e.g. the developmental primacy of information with the highest ecological validity). These features provide an overall cohesiveness to the presentation. Because there is nothing currently quite like it, the book is well positioned to make an immediate and significant impact on the field of infant cognition, an area of inquiry that will undoubtedly continue as one of the most active within cognitive science. Jacques Mehler and Emmanuel Dupouxs What Infants Know: The New Cognitive Science of Early Development is already five years old and has somewhat different empirical and theoretical emphases9. Alan Slaters edited volume, Perceptual Development: Visual, Auditory, and Speech Perception in Infancy, is contemporary, but multi-authored, and thus is not in a position to compete in terms of consistency of narration10. For teaching purposes, Kellman and Arterberrys book could be beneficially coupled with Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoffs Words, Thoughts, and Theories11, in a kind of pointcounterpoint contrast of bottom-up versus topdown approaches to early knowledge acquisition. Another option would be to use the text alongside Peter Jusczyks The Discovery of Spoken Language12,

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inasmuch as a grounding in speech is as important as a foundation in vision for understanding human development. However used, readers will benefit from having studied Kellman and Arterberrys impressive work.
Paul C. Quinn Department of Psychology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA. tel: +1 401 863 2727 fax: +1 401 863 1300 e-mail: Paul_Quinn@brown.edu References 1 Haith, M.M. (1998) Who put the cog in infant cognition? Is rich interpretation too costly? Infant Behav. Dev. 21, 167179 2 Meltzoff, A.N. and Moore, M.K. (1998) Object representation, identity, and the paradox of early permanence: steps toward a new framework Infant Behav. Dev. 21, 201235 3 Spelke, E.S. (1998) Nativism, empiricism, and the origins of knowledge Infant Behav. Dev. 21, 181200 4 Baillargeon, R. (1999) Young infants expectations about hidden objects: a reply to three challenges Dev. Sci. 2, 115132 5 Smith, L.B. (1999) Do infants possess innate knowledge structures? The con side Dev. Sci. 2, 133144 6 Goldstone, R.L. and Barsalou, L.W. (1998) Reuniting perception and conception Cognition 65, 231262 7 Mareschal, D., Plunkett, K. and Harris, P. (1995) Developing object permanence: a connectionist model, in Proc. 17th Annu. Conf. Cognit. Sci. Soc. (Moore, J.D. and Lehman, J.E., eds), pp. 170175, Erlbaum 8 Munakata, Y. et al. (1997) Rethinking infant knowledge: toward an adaptive process account of successes and failures in object permanence 686713 9 Mehler, J. and Dupoux, E. (1994) What Infants Know: The New Cognitive Science of Early Development, Blackwell 10 Slater, A., ed. (1998) Perceptual Development: Visual, Auditory, and Speech Perception in Infancy, Taylor & Francis 11 Gopnik, A. and Meltzoff, A.N. (1997) Words, Thoughts, and Theories, MIT Press 12 Jusczyk, P. (1997) The Discovery of Spoken Language, MIT Press tasks Psychol. Rev. 104,

Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons

by Christof Koch, Oxford University Press, 1999. 45.00 (xxiii + 552 pages) ISBN 019 510491 9
The behavior of central nervous system neurons depends on a complex interplay of ionic currents of multiple sources. This interplay determines how the neuron transforms various inputs into its main output the action potential. Understanding the type of computations underlying this inputoutput transformation often lies beyond the capacity of our intuitive reasoning because of the complexity of the interactions involved. A possible approach to this problem is that of computational neuroscience, which integrates biophysical and morphological data in computer models to investigate the range of complex operations taking place in neurons. This approach has become particularly interesting in the last 20 years or so because the key ionic mechanisms underlying neuronal operations have been precisely characterized by in vitro techniques, thereby allowing computational models to address questions in close relationship to experiments. A detailed account of this field requires an introduction of the basics as well as the details of the different ionic mechanisms that determine neuronal behavior, such as voltage-dependent currents, synaptic interactions, and so forth. It also needs a clear explanation of the rationale of the different formalisms used for modeling these ionic currents and how to apply them to investigate specific problems, such as that of dendritic integration. All these aspects are treated with a remarkable clarity by Christoph Koch in this well-written monograph. Biophysics of Computation is organized into small chapters, each containing a relatively stand-alone description of a specific topic, followed by a brief summary of one page or so at the end. The chapters are arranged in a logical order, starting with the basics on ionic currents and cable theory, and considering successively more complicated issues, such as dendritic integration and spike initiation. Indeed, one of the attractive features of the book is that each chapter can be consulted relatively independently. This aspect should be particularly appreciated by readers already familiar with the basics, who can therefore skip those chapters. Throughout this tour of the field, Koch uses neocortical pyramidal neurons as an example, and shows us a wide range of problems that can be investigated using computational modeling. As the author says, this book is not intended to be a primer for students, because of the complexity of the subjects treated, and also because the basics are relatively succinctly overviewed. It is more intended as a reference work for advanced graduate students and researchers in the field of computational neuroscience, and is also an indispensable companion for anyone seeking to understand more about the biophysical interactions that take place in neurons. Readers interested in problems related to systems neuroscience, such as learning or sensory perception, might be deceived though, because these aspects are barely mentioned here. However, apprehending these problems necessarily requires a deep understanding of issues such as dendritic attenuation, interaction of synaptic inputs with active membranes, or the type of processing performed by dendritic spines. These subjects are magisterially covered here and, in my

opinion, this is one the best overviews of these topics presently available. On the negative side, one might criticize the relatively narrow focus of the book, which essentially concentrates on single-cell or subcellular behavior, mostly of cortical pyramidal neurons. A lot of beautiful biophysically based modeling studies have been done at the network level or at the single-cell level for other cell types in the nervous system, and including them would have broadened the scope of the book. For example, the chapter on bursting cells is surprisingly short although this subject was intensely studied using computational models, and despite the fact that bursting plays a central role in both vertebrate and invertebrate neurophysiology. Fortunately though, these criticisms do not harm the quality of the presentation nor the scientific value of the work. This book should have an important impact in making the biophysics of neuronal behavior part of the general knowledge that any neuroscientist should have. Many of us would gain a lot by reading it.

Alain Destexhe Department of Physiology, Laval University, Quebec, Canada G1K 7P4. tel: +1 418 656 5711 fax: +1 418 656 7898 e-mail: alain@fmed.ulaval.ca

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