Item — HN Reader

I was surprised with the innate memory of spiders experiment so I look for some alternative explanations [1] as well as a link the original paper [2]. It seems that the study is not conclusive.

[1]: http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/10/03/do-infants-h...

[2]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130...

2 comments

If you're interested in the subject, here's another related study, which was published in 2010:

"And along came a spider: An attentional bias for the detection of spiders in young children and adults"

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096510...

"Preschoolers and adults were asked to find the single spider picture among an array of eight mushrooms or cockroaches or the reverse. Both children and adults detected the presence of spiders more rapidly than both categories of distracter stimuli."

There's also evidence that primates have an innate visual response to snakes - http://www.pnas.org/content/110/47/19000

You may also find this helpful: http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/ (The first paragraph is all I'm citing here.)

Even if we do innately "recognize" spiders, it is still not going to come with all the semantic content that an adult has when they look at a spider. It's something simpler. (But still amazing in its own way.)