Core knowledge

Compex cognitive skills such as reading and calculation and complex cognitive achievements such as formal science and mathematics may depend on a set of building block systems that emerge early in human ontogeny and phylogeny. These core knowledge systems show characteristic limits of domain and task specificity: Each serves to represent a particular class of entities for a particular set of purposes. By combining representations fr om these systems, however; human cognition may achieve extraordinary flexibility. Studies of cognition in human infants and in nonhuman primates therefore may contribute to understanding unique features of human knowledge.