William James, the author of the first scientific theory in psychology, wondered how the inner world of an infant who cannot speak works. Is it a continuous buzzing and ringing mess, or can you find some reason for separating things according to different criteria?
In modern language, we would ask: the formatting of the surrounding reality is a given for an adult, but is it given to an infant at once or does he learn to him? If he learns, then how, when and how?
Intuitive decisions
There is an assumption that thinking means using words or engaging in an internal dialogue. We sometimes hide the fact that some decisions we make on the basis of those thoughts that can hardly be expressed in words.
If we ponder and want to try to formulate in words why we made a decision, we will not be able to voice all its reasons. We often refer to concepts such as intuition, say that "it seems to me" or "I feel." Such phrases are not always accompanied by emotion or an unrelenting performance. On the one hand, behind them are often such forms of knowledge that psychologists call procedural, that is, those that are the summation of our experience based on statistical laws, the probability of the events we encounter.
On the other hand, sometimes we make such decisions based on some obvious assumptions that we always leave out of the brackets of our reasoning. We proceed from the premise that the world is arranged in a certain way. In terms of the early Greek philosophers, we have something like axiomatic statements about the structure of the world around us, which we do not question, which we use when we reason.
So, we have different forms of knowledge: some are based on emotions or on the summation and statistical assessment of previous experience, while others are axiomatic ideas about the structure of the surrounding world, which, apparently, are predetermined by our cognitive system. Cognitive development researchers study these forms of knowledge and try to imagine, understand, and study how an infant thinks.
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The law of conservation of an object behind a screen
Scientists have been conducting empirical research on this issue since about the middle of the 20th century. Among the earliest is the concept of Jean Piaget, according to which you and I first have a tabula rasa, we get a large amount of experience, and this experience makes us constantly build expectations and schemes of what we will see. They are justified or not, and gradually we crystallize the knowledge that we have on the formatting of the world. For example, only by the year you and I will expect that the object that drove behind the screen will remain behind it, despite the fact that you and I do not see it.
If we show an object of interest to a three-month-old child, wait for the moment when he stretches out his hand to him, and immediately cover this object with a cloth that he is quite capable of lifting, the child loses interest in him. He starts clapping on the blanket next to him and seems to forget about him. As if the phenomenon "out of sight - out of mind" is happening. In Jean Piaget's terminology, this meant that the child has no idea that a physical object that he does not see actually exists in reality.
More modern authors strongly doubt that a baby can really make such a mistake in understanding the world around him, because he observes it so much and in large numbers, despite the fact that he is small.
Rene Bayargeon suggested the opposite of what Piaget said. In her experiments, she tried to prove that the child most likely understands that the objects hidden by the screen remain behind her. She carried out work in which she showed the ability of an infant to be surprised at situations of violation of physical laws.
In one such experiment, a wooden cube was placed behind a screen. The children were not "surprised" if the screen tilted away from them, reached the cube and returned, opening the cube, but they were surprised if the screen tilted away from them completely, lying on the table, and then returned, and the cube turned out to be behind it. Towards five months, babies can also understand the fact that such a hard and heavy object, such as a cube, cannot be in the air without support: if its center of gravity goes over the edge of the support and does not fall, they are "surprised."
At the same ages, babies understand that an object that slides and must rest against an obstacle in its path, but calmly passes through the obstacle further, violates physical laws. They look at this situation longer. That is, their ability to understand the world around them is quite high.
What does a baby understand
In many other areas, babies' understanding of their surroundings is also learned through habituation and surprise in relation to change.
To find out if a baby recognizes colors in the same way as an adult, we show him an object of the same color many times, wait until his interest in this object drops to half. Then we show the same object in a different color or shade. The return of the child's attention and interest allows us to see what change is really noticeable and important to him. It turned out that infants already four months of age will look at an object longer if it is different in color than if it is different in hue, despite the fact that the hue was chosen physically as different from the original color. Through experiments of this kind, it is possible to show that at the level of perception, a child understands a lot in the earliest, infantile months of his life, just like an adult.
Surprisingly, babies cannot rely on the ability to perceive the world around them in order to lift the blanket with which we covered the object of interest to them and reach it.
For example, they cannot pass another Piaget test: we put two boxes, in front of their eyes we cover the object of interest with one of the boxes, let them get the object out from under the box, rejoice with them, and then we hide this object in front of their eyes under another box. It turns out that an infant under nine months of age will look for the object again under the first box. Although they saw that we hid the object under the second, they still look for it under the first box. As if they are looking where they have already found, and not where the object is in reality.
From theory to action
Modern authors decided to see if this kind of results could be explained by the fact that the child's knowledge does not help him to act in accordance with him, to adapt to the world around him, relying on him.
Adele Diamond, wanting to test this assumption, proposed the following experiment: she made a special lead sleeve and put it on a child who had just found an object under the first box in a problem. It turned out that such a sleeve makes the child look for an object in the right box, that is, it allows him to reorganize from a very successful previous action to a new one that takes into account a new circumstance.
The fact is that for our nervous system the weight of a motor organ, the weight of a part of our body is one of the conditions that must be taken into account when building a movement program. That is, the movement program that the brain builds for the hand is designed for a certain weight. If we instantly change the weight of the limb, the nervous system rearranges the movement program. It turns out that a child who “sees” physical laws, in order to use them, must still be able to control programs of actions that are based on the visible.
Perception of the living and non-living
The fact that a child in the world around him "sees by eye" is rather strongly formatted. To use this knowledge the way an adult does, he needs big steps in cognitive development, including speech, which allow him to more control motives, to control his actions and attention.
Formatting views includes, among other things, the difference between living and non-living. For many authors, this was surprising, strange and unexpected, since it was assumed that it was difficult to understand physical objects, but understanding objects with a psyche, or animated objects with intentions and goals, is certainly not a task for an infant.
But it turned out that they are not surprised (they do not increase the number of gaze fixations) if the dolls are forced to move one another without physical contact, without touching each other, when one simply approaches the other and the second begins to move. But if this happens between cubes or mechanical structures, if one for some reason starts to move spontaneously, this causes great surprise in children. It turns out that non-contact impulse transmission for mechanical objects is unacceptable. An anthropomorphic object can begin to move spontaneously, regardless of physical contact or stimulus from another object.
Does the infant understand what adults want
The research conducted by Annette Woodward was structured in a paradigm that assesses whether a child can recognize a target. The child is shown a person who, out of two objects several times in a row, chooses one on the left, and is very happy with him. Then the objects are swapped.
In one group, babies will see an adult pick the same object in a different location. And in another group, babies will see an adult choose a different object, but in the same place. Both will have a certain degree of novelty. But for some, novelty is associated with the place where the adult's hand reaches, and for others, novelty is associated with the object to which the adult's hand reaches.
From the age of six months, babies distinguish between these options. In one case, if a person is drawn to a new object, they are surprised because there has been a change in purpose. In another case, when a person is drawn to a new place, but to the same object, they are not surprised. It turns out that they understand that the person's goal has remained the same, so nothing interesting and strange happens here: this is all expected, understandable, so there is no point in looking here longer. Babies at nine, seven and six months do this, but at three months they do not.
When Woodward finds out about this fact, she thinks about the fact that three-month-old babies are people who are still very bad at grabbing something themselves. Their coordination of hand and finger movements is so weak that they are very unlikely to be able to pick up an object, even if they want to.
Woodward and colleagues put special sticky gloves on three-month-old babies and gave them objects that have a sticky response. This greatly increases the likelihood that the child will grab what he is reaching for. It is enough to touch the object, and it is already in your hands. It's a success, and it's so great that you got what you wanted. After a few hours of this experience in the shift / target paradigm, they began to wonder the same thing as six-month-olds.
Annette Woodward believes that the experience of acting allowed them to recognize the goals and intentions of another actor. On the basis of such works, she built an influential concept of where the understanding of other people comes from, how and from what material a person creates it, on what it bases. Based on a certain experience, a child can very early identify very detailed intentions of other people in the surrounding reality.
At the age of one and a half years, children can recognize not only the intention to refuse to receive a toy, but also its reason. They can see the difference between situations where an adult is distracted and therefore cannot serve a toy, when he prohibits the use of the toy, or when he has not heard and therefore does not serve the toy that the child asks for.
The role of communication in determining intentions
Other authors decided to see what would happen if we reduce all the variety of possible signs of a living object to the fact that it will have a certain orientation, a choice. In this case, will the infant assign a goal to this creature? It was a green oval on the screen, which turned in one direction, then in the other towards the symbols on the screen (to the conventional food), then chose one of them and moved towards it.
It turned out that children at the age of seven or eight months were surprised in accordance with the ideas of intention in relation to the choice of a green oval, as well as in relation to the choice of a human hand. But a prerequisite was that the experimenter had previously communicated with this "being". The experimenter said: “Hello, hello!”, He squeaked something back to him, moved; the experimenter said, "How are you?" - he reacted again.
Children began to ascribe intent and purpose to the green oval in the choice of objects under the condition of communication. And if there was no communicative condition beforehand, then, accordingly, this green oval was not perceived as someone who could have goals and want to deliberately choose something. Just participation in communication between those whom the child sees is enough for him to expect behavior from them in accordance with the characteristics of the living. This is a very complex design, but it works. It turns out that it allows a child in infancy to recognize a lot and use it in order to quickly isolate where the person is, where the loved one is, where is the person who is ready to teach and care.