The Feeling of Indebtedness

I don’t think this is particularly Japanese, but I feel indebted to many people one of these days: teachers and professors who let me observe their classes and help me carry out surveys with students as well as students themselves who take the surveys seriously and are willing to talk with me when they have time. Without their generosity, my research is impossible…so I hope I will be able to do something for them in return.

As results of surveys start rolling in, I cannot help entertaining possible publications. One of them is on domain specificity of human cognition. (A tentative title for this paper is “What is Domain Specificity Good for?”) While I tend to agree with psychologists who argue for domain-specific cognitive development, I have come to suspect that a hallmark of human cognition is development of capability to coordinate domain-specific knowledges so as to solve complex problems in real life. And I believe that children are precocious in developing this “interdisciplinary” cognition.