The Scientist In The Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn

For Piaget, learning was as natural as eating. This idea is the second element in the new developmental science.

The broad lines of the developmental answer to this question should be familiar by now. Babies are born knowing a great deal about language. They also have powerful learning procedures that allow them to add to that knowledge and, in particular, to learn all the details and peculiarities of the language of their own community. Finally, adults play

The theories also go beyond the evidence they are based on. That means they allow scientists to make new predictions about things they’ve never seen before, just as the children’s representations allow them to make new predictions. Those predictions allow scientists, and children, to act on the world in more effective ways. Just as babies play with

In this book we tell the story of the new science of children’s minds.

In other words, the brain seems to love to learn from other people.

Imitation is the motor for culture. By imitating what the particular adults around them do, young children learn how to behave in the particular social world—the particular family or community or culture—they find themselves in. They can draw a bow or dress a doll or even learn such bizarre cultural rituals as pulling a piece of toothed plastic thr

They formulate theories, make and test predictions, seek explanations, do experiments, and revise what they know in the light of new evidence. These abilities are at the core of the success of science. All the social institutions would be useless if individual scientists couldn’t create theories and test them.

The second important thing about the influence of other people is that the most significant behavior seems almost entirely unintentional. Parents don’t deliberately set out to imitate their babies or to speak motherese; it’s just what comes naturally. Our instinctive behaviors toward babies and babies’ instinctive behaviors toward us combine to ena

So in the first few months of life, babies already seem to have solved a number of deep philosophical conundrums. They know how to use edges and patterns of movement to segregate the world into separate objects. They know something about how those objects characteristically move. They know that those objects are part of a three-dimensional space. A