 Dr. David Moore is a Professor of Psychology at Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University. He received his B.A. in psychology from Tufts University, his M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Harvard University, and completed a one-year National Institutes of Health post-doctoral fellowship at the City University of New York. Dr. Moore’s research explores the development of perception and cognition in infancy; his recent work has examined infants’ perception of Infant-Directed Speech and five-month-olds’ putative ‘mathematical’ abilities. He has served as a reviewer for Developmental Psychology, Child Development, Cognitive Development, and Developmental Science, among others, and was a panelist for the National Science Foundation’s 2004 Human & Social Dynamics competition. He is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the International Society for Infant Studies. His book The Dependent Gene: The Fallacy of “Nature vs. Nurture” (Times Books/Henry Holt) was nominated for the Cognitive Development Society Best Authored Volume (2002-2003). His recent publications include Perception Precedes Computation: Can Familiarity Preferences Explain Apparent Calculation by Human Babies?, which appeared in Developmental Psychology last summer, and A Very Little Bit of Knowledge: Re-Evaluating the Meaning of the Heritability of IQ, which appeared in Human Development in December. |
| Abstract: The developmental-systems perspective holds that behavior is an aspect of biology, and that like all biological characteristics, it can be understood completely only by analyzing the interaction of the components that contribute to its development. Biologists have concluded that all of our characteristics reflect gene-environment interactions; they never result from the unfolding of genetically controlled, deterministic developmental programs. Consequently, although detailed analyses of the causes of behaviors will invariably invoke genetic factors, even behaviors posited to emerge from species-typical mental organs, like language, will remain poorly understood until the contributions of experiential factors to their development are elucidated. This is because traits develop from interactions occurring at the levels of the genes, cells, organs, and environments, and because causation is bi-directional in biological systems; thus, higher-level (e.g., social) signals can affect events at lower levels (including genetic events), giving environmental factors the means to influence biological processes. Genes act only in collaboration with environmental information, major brain structures reflect experience, and on close inspection, traits that seem innate are not innate; thus, the emergence of behavioral characteristics can be understood only via analysis of their development, a unitary process that utilizes both genetic and non-genetic resources in its realization. |