What’s Innate?
I thought I’d briefly mention two recent papers, both of which bear on issues of “innateness.”
First, a paper just came out in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Vanessa LoBue, David Rakison, and Judy DeLaoache. The issue at hand is the development of the fear of snakes and spiders.
The authors review data from primates and children investigating this question. For instance, in one classic body of work (Ohman & Mineka, 2001, 2003), rhesus monkeys who were reared in a lab – and so were known not to have seen snakes – were shown another rhesus monkey freaking out when it was paired with either a snake or a flower. These monkeys were then tested to see if they acquired a fear of snakes and/or flowers. If all stimuli were treated equally, then you’d expect them to become afraid of both. But that’s not what happened: they acquired a fear of snakes but flowers… not so much. Similar (but not identical) research with humans suggests, for instance, that human babies faced with pairs of images – again snakes and flowers – look more at the snake.
LoBue et al. distinguish two possibilities. One is that there is “an evolved fear module,” which is “activated by certain types of stimuli” and “results ultimately in a defensive response.” They contrast this idea with their model “that humans possess low-level visual biases for the perception of evolutionarily relevant threats that function only to draw attention to important stimuli in the environment.” Theirs is more conservative, they say, because they “do not describe any specialized neural circuitry to explain the studied behaviors.” It seems to me that this is more conservative, but it also doesn’t explain the data; it explains why people attend to these items, but doesn’t explain the fear. Later, however, they say that they think that “humans have a perceptual bias for the rapid detection of evolutionarily relevant threats and a bias for the rapid association of these threats with fear,” adding the association claim to the one about detection and attention.
Anyway, one line that I thought was interesting was their claim that “monkeys do not have an innate fear of snakes but instead learn this fear through observation” (p. 377).
What does “innate” mean here? It seems like there are at least two possible meanings. One would be “present at birth.” If that’s what “innate” means, then traits like teeth are not innate. And if they’re not innate, then they’re – what? – learned?
A second meaning might be something like this. A trait is “innate” if it develops in all normal members of the species and does not depend on the environment in which the individual develops. That sort of view captures cases like teeth. But then you run into cases like calluses, which do depend exquisitely on the environment.
As usual, I think it’s sensible to talk about whether there are mechanisms specialized for this adaptive problem – the dangers posed by snakes and spiders – which will be more useful than the issue of “innateness.”
I thought I’d also just mention briefly another paper, just published in Science. Lotte Thomsen and colleagues looked at infants (8 months old and 10-13 months old), using a looking time paradigm to investigate if infants have – roughly – an intuitive theory about power relationships, and expect little people to defer to big people. Using cute little videos, they found that the younger group didn’t seem to have the expectation that little block would let big block walk on by, but the older group did.
Anyway, two recent developmental papers, which I find innately interesting.
References
Note: Ohman properly has an umlaut over the O. I wasn’t able to figure out how to put diacritical marks in. My apologies.
Ohman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108, 483–522.
Ohman, A., & Mineka, S. (2003). The malicious serpent: Snakes as a prototypical stimulus for an evolved fear module. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 5–9.
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