In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view which states that the brain has little innate ability and almost everything is learned through interaction with the environment. Psychology (from Greek: ψυχή, psukhē, spirit, soul; and λόγος, logos, knowledge) is an academic/ applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. ... Italic text // ahh addiing sum spiice iin hurr`` For other uses, see Brain (disambiguation). ... Childbirth (also called labour, birth, partus or parturition) is the culmination of a human pregnancy with the emergence of a newborn infant/s from the mothers uterus. ... Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet or clean slate) refers to the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, blank, and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the...

When understood as an interdisciplinary field in their own right, nativist approaches are referred to collectively as nativist theorizing. Interdisciplinary work is that which integrates concepts across different disciplines. ...

Nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker, who argue that we are born with certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills (such as language). They argue that many such abilities would otherwise be greatly impaired without this genetic contribution. For example, children demonstrate a facility with acquiring spoken language but require intense training to learn to read and write. In The Blank Slate, Pinker cites this as evidence that humans have an inborn facility with speech acquisition (but not with literacy acquisition). Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is a philosopher at Rutgers University, New Jersey. ... Avram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew and Yiddish: אברם נועם חומסקי) , Ph. ... Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a prominent Canadian-born American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. ... The word cognitivism is used in several ways: In ethics, cognitivism is the philosophical view that ethical sentences express propositions, and hence are capable of being true or false. ... Modularity is a concept that has applications in the contexts of computer science, particularly programming, as well as cognitive science in investigating the structure of mind. ... The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a 2002 book (published by Penguin Putnam, ISBN 0670031518) by Steven Pinker arguing against tabula rasa models of psychology, claiming that the human mind is shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations. ...

David Reimer, a boy unsusccessfully raised as a girl, also serves as a nativist case in point. David Reimer David Reimer (August 22, 1965 – May 5, 2004) was a Canadian man who was born as a mentally and biologically healthy boy, but was sexually reassigned and raised as a girl in an attempt to improve his life after his penis was inadvertently destroyed during circumcision. ...

Psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith has put forward a theory known as the representational redescription or RR model of development which argues against such strict nativism and which proposes that the brain may become modular through experience within certain domains (such as social interaction or visual perception) rather than modules being genetically pre-specified. This does not cite any references or sources. ...

In the United Kingdom, Stephen Laurence of the University of Sheffield initiated an interdisciplinary nativist theorizing project, entitled Innateness and the Structure of the Mind, which ran from 2001 to 2004 and was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Board (AHRB). [1] Stephen Laurence is a scientist and philosopher, currently at the University of Sheffield, whose primary areas of research interest are the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and cognitive science. ... The University of Sheffield is a research university, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. ... The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research in the arts and humanities, mainly to universities in the United Kingdom. ...

See Also

• Domain specificity
• Evolutionary psychology
• Nature versus nurture
• Universal grammar