Rethinking innateness : a connectionist perspective on development

This text asks the question, what does it really mean to say that a behaviour is innate?

The authors describe a framework in which interactions occurring at all levels give rise to emergent forms and behaviours.

These outcomes often may be highly constrained and universal, yet are not themselves directly contained in the genes in any domain-specific way.

The authors explore their ideas through dynamic models inspired by a new kind of "developmental connectionism", a marriage of connectionist models and developmental neurobiology, forming a new theoretical framework for the study of behavioural development.