Módulos, dominios y otros artefactos

Resum

Since the 1980's modularity and domain specific theories have become a progressively influential alternative to classic domain general theories -both of Piagetian tradition as well as information processing psychology. Developmental psychology has been greatly influenced by this theoretical change. One of the reasons why many developmental psychologists adopted enthusiastically the assumptions of a modular mind model was due to the great number of studies showing that sophisticated abilities were already present in infants and very young children. The purpose of this article is to discuss and analyse some of the developmental results on which modularity-innateness theorization are based. As it is impossible to comprehensible address all the relevant problems to this discussion, we have selected only some aspects of current research to illustrate our argument on the weakness of a nativist modular mind approach. In addition to developmental data, we present comparative studies and data on "mind specialisation"-both on normal functioning as well as on certain pathologies. Although we accept that the problem of how the mind develops remains open, we insist that explanations about development need to be psychological and biologically plausible. From our viewpoint, current constructivist models provide better explanations of development than nativist-modular approaches.