Departmental Colloquium: Incomplete Language of Thought in infancy

The view that infants possess a full-fledged propositional Language of Thought (LoT) is appealing, providing a unifying account for infants’ precocious reasoning skills in several domains. In this talk, I'll present evidence that preverbal infants possess structured mental representations, with abstract generalizable content. However, I'll argue that careful appraisal of empirical evidence suggests that infants lack a crucial component of a propositional LoT: discrete representations of abstract relations.