5.10.3. End Notes
Although if you do want to dwell on the role of language in brain evolution (and vice versa), you should start by reading Terrence Deacon’s fantastic The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Company (1998).
The article that contains this theory was published by Peter Carruthers in Behavioural and Brain Sciences. It, and the response to comments on it, are at http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/people/faculty/pcarruthers/Cognitive-language.htm and http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/people/faculty/pcarruthers/BBS-reply.htm.
OK, by “modules,” he means a lot more than that, but that’s the basic idea. Read Jerry Fodor’s Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) for the original articulation of this concept. The importance of modularity is also emphasized by evolutionary psychologists, such as Steven Pinker.
Much of the work Peter Carruthers bases his theory on was done at the lab of Elizabeth Spelke (http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds).
Strictly, you don’t have to use both kinds of information in combination at the same time to pass this test; you could use the geometric information and then use the color information, but there is other good evidence that the subjects of the experiments described hererats, children, and adultsdon’t do this.
Hermer-Vazquez, L., Spelke, E. S., & Katsnelson, A. S. (1999). Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual-task studies of space and language. Cognitive Psychology, 39(1), 3-36.
Berk, L. E. (November 1994). Why children talk to themselves. Scientific American, 78-83 (http://www.abacon.com/berk/ica/research.html).
Taken from : Mind Hacks
