Inside the Marvelous Minds of Babies and Young Children

What's it like to be a baby? "Imagine you're in Paris...and you've had four cups of double espresso...and you're in love," development psychologist Alison Gopnik said at a recent lecture in Seattle. "No wonder you wake up at 3 a.m. crying.”

The author of the new book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, was trying to explain the consciousness of babies and young children. “Adults focus on the things that they're paying attention to, and we tune out everything else,” she explained. “Babies see everything in the world around them.” In many ways, babies and young children are more conscious than adults. The nearest adult parallel is a person traveling to a foreign country where everything is new. The amount of stimulus and stimulation can be overwhelming.

How can we know that, since none of us remember our infancy and have only fleeting memories of our first five years?

We can't measure the ephemeral consciousness, but scientists can track what babies pay attention to by following their eye movements. “When I attend to something, I become vividly conscious of it,” Gopnik writes in The Philosophical Baby. Researchers can measure babies' and children's brain waves when they are looking at unexpected events, and they are the same as adults' brain waves as their eyes scan important features.

But babies, toddlers and preschoolers use “lantern vision” as opposed to adults' “spotlight vision,” Gopnik said in her lecture.

In one experiment, adults were shown a video of several people throwing a ball and were told to count the number of times the ball went from hand to hand. The adults concentrated well on the ball, but they did not notice someone in a gorilla suit walking right through the scene. The babies' eyes followed the gorilla as well as the balls.
“Attending to one thing can actually make us less conscious of the other things around us, even salient or new or unexpected things,” Gopnik writes. “Babies seem to have an infinitely voracious appetite for the unexpected.”

The Learning Years

In her 30 years in the field, Gopnik – who coauthored The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind and How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood, with University of Washington researchers Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl – has seen a change from the view of babies and young children as “immoral, illogical, defective adults” to the discovery that they “learn more, imagine more, care more and experience more than we would ever have thought possible.”

In a recent interview, she said her most amazing discovery is that babies less than a year old use statistics. “It's been a really striking surprise,” she said.

In one of many experiments, 9-month-old babies were shown a transparent box full of mixed-up red and white Ping-Pong balls. Sometimes the balls were mostly white with a few red ones mixed in; sometimes they were mostly red with a few white ones. Then the experimenter covered the box and took out either four red balls and one white one or vice versa. The babies looked longer when she pulled out mostly red balls from a mostly white box than when she pulled out mostly white balls from a mostly white box or mostly red balls from a mostly red box. They had developed an early sense of probability.

Babies and toddlers will play much longer with a toy that does unexpected things than with one that always acts in a certain way when you push a certain lever. “We've found that when children are playing, they're pretty sensitive to what gives the most bang for the buck,” Gopnik said. “Children learn through play – but not just randomly. They play in ways that help them learn the most.”

As they learn about the physical world, babies, toddlers and preschoolers are continually conducting experiments to figure out how things work and to form “causal maps” in their brains. They also minutely observe the actions of others to see what works – and what doesn't. “They're doing a kind of math in their heads to think of all the possibilities for how the world works, and then figuring out which ones are actually true,” Gopnik said. Their continual experiments are what we call “getting into things.”

Beyond that, babies, toddlers and preschoolers study the actions, words and facial expressions of others and draw conclusions about personality traits. They form “theories of mind” about how other people think and feel. From the time they're born, children show empathy, identify with other people and recognize that their own feelings are shared by others, Gopnik writes. One-year-olds understand the difference between intentional and unintentional actions and behave altruistically. Three-year-olds have a basic ethic of care and compassion.

Imagination is the hallmark of early childhood. “We used to think (young children) didn't know the difference between real and imaginary people and things, but they do,” Gopnik said. Three- and 4-year olds create vivid imaginary creatures, but they are quick to tell the researchers that they aren't real. “Children use imaginary companions to explore the possibilities of human nature,” she explained.

Humans' long period of immaturity, when children are cared for and sheltered by adults, allows children to experiment, to explore, to imagine and to learn so that they will grow up to be adaptable, innovative and able to envision new possibilities and solutions, Gopnik said. “Babies are the research and development department of the human race.”

Wenda Reed is a Bothell freelance writer with a fascination for how children learn and imagine.