Alison Gopnik's theory of infant cognition and development

¶ … Lantern

What do Babies Think?

Psychologists and the rest of the world have always regarded babies as incomplete, merely forming adults whose thoughts can only be rudimental and purposeless. But Alison Gopnik explored deeply into this issue and came out with the staggering finding that babies are actually smarter and meaningful than we all thought, even more intelligent than adults in essence. Gopnik is a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley who published her discover in a book entitled, "The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell us about the Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life."

In totality, Gopnik (2010) discovered that babies and young children are designed by nature to learn but with a kind of intelligence far different from that of adults but very relevant to development and growth. Babies and young children, first of all, do think and their minds develop in a way clearly intended to change the world. Psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and computer scientists have come to recognize this. They are now in the process of identifying underlying mechanisms, which explain this distinctively human capability to change. These underlying mechanisms are aspects of human nature, which lead to nurturing and form culture. These professionals are just beginning to develop strict mathematical accounts of these mechanisms in the last few years. This explosive new research and concept enables an understanding of how biological computers in the brain actually format human freedom and flexibility. Every person is a creation of the human imagination. The theory advances that childhood as the period of immaturity actually plays an indispensable role in the human ability the world and people. It revises the long-held assumption that children are only defective adults, primitive prototype of grownups only gradually attaining perfection and complexity. The theory proposes that children and adults are two entirely different forms with equally complex and powerful minds, brains, and consciousness. Both are designed by nature to serve different evolutionally functions. The author is convinced that human development is a metamorphosis rather than simple growth. They are like vibrant and dynamic caterpillars, which become butterflies weaving through the path of growth (Gopnik).

Critical Analysis

Piaget: Babies Have no Sense of Object Permanence

Daniel Haworth conducted different experiments on infant attention at a special unit, called Babylab, at the University of Manchester in Northwest England (Manchester, 2007). His purpose was to investigate how babies think as a follow-up of the work of the Swiss pioneer Jean Piaget on children in the 1920s. Piaget concluded that infants less than 9 months old had no innate knowledge of the workings of the world and no sense of object permanence. This means that babies at this age have not yet learned that things and people not seen also exist. This constructivist theory dominated postwar education and psychology but was largely replaced by the nativist theory laid down by psychologists and cognitive scientists. Their more sophisticated experiments concluded that infants are born with the capacity and knowledge of the physical world and even some elemental programming for math and language (Manchester).

BabyLab director Sylvain Sirois processed the different smart-baby theories and favored the traditional position held by Piaget (Manchester, 2007). Babies "know squat," he concluded. He and his postgraduate assistant, Iain Jackson, challenged the interpretation of different classic experiments from the mid-80s. The sample babies were shown physical events, which violated the concepts of gravity, solidity and contiguity. Findings of these experiments suggested that babies as young as 3 1/2 months can detect a problematic situation. Sirois had no problems with the methods applied but in the interpretation. He and his assistant, Jackson, objected to the conclusion of observed innate or precocious social cognition skills in infants. They argued that the sample baby's fascination towards physically impossible events only represented a response to new stimuli. He found possible events as interesting as familiar objects. He pointed to the mistake of previous research's jumping into the conclusion that infants are capable of understanding the concept of impossibility from their perception of some novelty. Siroin asserted that babies have to learn everything from a few primitive reflexes to make things move. A baby's eyes are, for example drawn to a human face as an instinct already hardwired in his brain. Brain-imaging studies showed a kind of visual buffer, which represents objects after they are removed. The perception, rather than conceptual understanding, lingers in his mind. When unexpected events are presented to a baby, a mismatch occurs between the buffer and the new information at first. The buffer has to be cleared up first and attention is needed to do so. Sirois suggested that learning is, therefore, the toilsome resolving of mismatches in the brain (Manchester).

Their Thought Content

The psychology of babies is far different from the psychology of children and adults (Brooks, 2012). Babies have no past as frame of reference. Everything is in here and now, for the moment while they develop a memory. Most of their first thoughts are simple equations, such as food and mom, softness then scratching and cat, car seat and movement and new colors. This is how impressions get imprinted into them and how they learn to think. Their thoughts are first rudimentary and evolving into thought process, which begin from simple logical connections of this thing, which means that thing. Some of their thoughts are instinctive, so they learn to avoid pain and to feed. And contrary to 20th century belief among medical personnel, babies certainly feel pain. Those who inflict the pain will necessary refuse to admit that babies feel the pain as this creates negative response. But the connection and pathways are forming in a baby's brain. Hence, those who care for newborns should do so in quietness, gentleness and a positive stance up to at least six-month. This is the time that babies start to form more complex thoughts through the rubble of confusion and responses to stimuli (Brooks).

Pre-verbal Infants Think

Earlier research says that adults actually categorize things differently according to the language they speak (Catania, 2004). Thus, language influences their thought. Babies as young as 5 months, on the other hand, make distinctions about categories their parents do not make. Assistant psychology and human development Sue Hespos of the Vanderbilt University and Harvard University psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke, in a published article, stated that language capitalizes on a pre-existing system wherein how objects behave and interact is known. This pre-existing ability hints that babies and young children think before they learn to speak (Catania).

Earlier research says that infants are sensitive to language's acoustic differences, which adults no longer hear (Catania, 2004). An adult native-English speaker will, for example, hear subtle sounds and then lose the awareness as they develop language skills through the first year of life. Hespos and Spelke wanted to ascertain infants' sensitiveness to concepts as they are to sounds and the impact of language on their thoughts about the environment. Their search was, for example, directed at the different languages, which describe space. The distinction between a fit as against a loose fit is clear in Korean but not in English. They investigated five-month-old infants from English-speaking homes on this distinction. The investigation drew from their observation of infants' tendency to look at new events and then look away when they get bored. They observed that infants looked longer at objects when changed between tight and loose fit, which indicated that they detected the Korean concept (Catania).

Hespos and Spelke repeated the experiment with adults to find out if English-speaking adults would make the same distinction (Catania, 2004). They found out that these adults ignored tight vs. loose fit and looked at "in" versus "on." Hespos felt that babies in this group were actually detecting the distinction. Earlier research concluded that non-human primates likewise make the distinction in both comparisons. This led Hespos and Spekle to assume that these conceptual relationships are independent of language (Catania).

Conclusion

The current position held by psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers and the rest of the world is that basis are irrational, egocentric and amoral (Gopnik, 2010). This developed from the traditional theory by Piaget that babies and young children have no innate knowledge of the world and no sense of object permanence. Brooks sustains this theory by asserting that they do not have a past to use as frame of reference and that they live only in the here and now with a capability for only a rudimentary form of knowledge. Hespos and Spelke, however, suggest that babies and young children can and actually think before they can speak and that their thoughts and way of thinking exist independently of language. Bloom suggests that babies and children are not amoral. Rather, they possess an inherent moral code, as shown by the findings of three separate experiments. But Gopnik came out with recent discoveries, which revealed that even the youngest children know more than everyone thought. Studies also showed that they learn about their environment as systematically as scientists do by experimenting, analyzing statistics, and forming their own theories about the physical, biological and psychological spheres. Since the year 2000, researchers began to see and understand the computational, evolutionary and neurological workings of the early but amazing capabilities of babies and young children. This unprecedented discovery is seen to alter current theories about babies and replace them with an entirely new perception of human nature itself.

New findings provide evidence that babies and young children possess cognitive abilities, which exceed those earlier thought. They learn scientifically and in better ways than scientists do. And the long period of helplessness and dependence may be a kind of evolutionary trade-off for their forthcoming role of acquiring huge learning and creativity in their own time that will shape the world accordingly. These are inherently programmed into them and just waiting to break out. #