Gary Marcus - Research and Written Work

Research and Written Work

Marcus’ early work focused on why children produce overregularizations, such as breaked and goed, as a test case for the nature of mental rules.

In his doctoral dissertation, Marcus studied how children acquired the past tense of English verbs. He looked at 11,500 utterances by children to see when their past-tense forms were right, when they were wrong, and what the circumstances were. Although children knew how to use the past tense default (adding –ed to the end of a verb) they were unable to do so with verbs they did not know.

In 1999, he discovered that 7-month infants have the capacity to acquire abstract rules, such as the ABB structure in sentences such as la ta ta and wo fe fe.

In his first book, The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2001), Marcus challenged the idea that the mind might consist of largely undifferentiated neural networks. He argued that understanding the mind would require integrating connectionism with classical ideas about symbol-manipulation.

In his second book, published in 2004, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, Marcus goes into a more detailed explanation of the genetic support systems of human thought. He explains how a small number of genes account for the intricate human brain, common false impressions of genes, and the problems they may cause for the future of genetic engineering.

In 2005, Marcus was editor of The Norton Psychology Reader, including selections by cognitive scientists on modern science of the human mind.

Marcus' 2012 book, Guitar Zero, explores the process of taking up a musical instrument as an adult.