The Wild Child, By Dr. Gene Itard - 1599 Words

If being a social creature is that integral to cognitive, social and emotional development, how would a person whose environment is devoid of any human social stimuli act, speak or behave? A 1970 French film, The Wild Child, delves into this extremity and depicts a savage boy’s trials and tribulations of becoming a cognitively functioning social being through the patient efforts of a physician, named Dr. Gene Itard. The boy lived his first eleven or twelve years in the vast wilderness of a forest with little to no human interaction and after a nearby villager spots the boy in the forest, local law enforcement apprehend the child and bring him into custody. He is sequentially discovered and examined by Dr. Gene Itard, who realizes the boy is either deaf or dumb. At this point of the movie the viewer is bound to question how the boy was able to survive for such a duration on his own. We can conclude, however, that however much or however little cognition the boy had attained thr ough the span of his short life, was enough to survive his misfortune, which can be attributed to the flexible nature of cognition to adapt. This ability to adapt is one of the 7 features of cognition. Throughout the rest of the movie, Dr. Itard painstakingly tries to teach the boy, who he names Victor, to identify and use different vocal sounds to articulate his wants and needs (i.e. food, water, ride on wheelbarrow). Victor gradually starts showing signs of intelligence through this method of vocal